Abstract:
With the digital era that the world has plunged in today together with the fueling of enticing audio-visual gadgets, especially towards the youth, is the
reading culture not taking the risk of becoming obsolete, and seeing itself in the worst plight of sinking into oblivion? And is this fact not going to be worse
mostly in countries like ours where people are not used to reading too much? If that was the case, this would be being forgetful or simply ungrateful about all the
benefits that the book industry has contributed to human civilization. By coming in with our topic, we wanted to show how the habit of reading
is paramount in the teaching/ learning of French. We took a statistical population of 6o finalist learners from three schools teaching French as the main subject.
From those, we drew a sample of 15 learners through the stratified and convenience sampling methods facilitated in this by their comrades and teachers
who chose them as the best readers in their schools. They had ranged them according to their degree of proficiency. We gave a test to all the population of 60
learners and we followed up the 15 closely to observe whether they would also emerge above the 60 as the first performers in a simulated national English exam.
We also submitted a questionnaire which all of them had to answer for ample information. Thus, we got qualitative and quantitative data which we had to
analyze afterwards with the SPSS tool for descriptive and inferential statistics about Pearson and Spearman Rank correlations. Results showed a positive correlation, though weak (<10%), between socio-demographic and economic factors and competence in French language.
There was also a positive correlation between individual characteristics, school educational context and the competence in question. The correlation was notably
significant between reading performance and the language mastery (>70%). We concluded that, as shown by the case of learning/teaching French in Ruhango District, giving reading activity a very big importance has a very positive impact on French language competence.
