English Paper 2 May/June 2015

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.
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  • 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.
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  • 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.
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