Candidates’ Weaknesses and Suggested Remedies

The weaknesses are same as those listed in this section every year. They include:

insufficient material to develop chosen essay topic;

wrong use of tenses and number;

lack of familiarity with the written word;

inability to restate in the candidate’s own words, ideas contained in a passage;

inability to identify parts of speech and how they function in sentences;

ignorance of common literary terms;

mindless lifting of portions of the set passages as answers;

use of text message abbreviations “u” for “you”, “c” for “see”, etc.

 

SUGGESTED REMEDIES

Candidates should:

learn the basic grammatical structures of the English Language;

 inculcate the habit of reading widely with a view to improving their vocabulary;

converse regularly in simple, correct English;

 practise essay writing regularly;

choose topics for which they have sufficient material;

 understand the demands of questions before answering them

learn to restate answers in their own words.

 

Schools should ensure that:

only qualified teachers  teach this subject;

class sizes are not unwieldy;

in addition to giving their students assignments frequently, teachers also  mark such assignments in order to help students identify and correct their mistakes;

teachers are exposed to workshops and seminars that would keep them abreast of global best practices in the teaching of the English Language.