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.