CANDIDATES’ WEAKNESSES
Candidates’ weaknesses were revealed in the three sections of the paper. These weaknesses included:
- lack of expression to carry through their ideas;
- poor understanding of the questions;
- spelling errors;
- ignorance of the difference between ‘singular’ and ‘plural’; ‘present tense’ and ‘past tense’;
- inability to construct meaningful sentences;
- indiscriminate use of capital letter;
- interchangeable use of phonetically similar words e.g. loose for lose; know for no, meat for meat etc;
- providing answers that have no relationship to the questions;
- inability to re-state in the candidate’s own words, ideas contained in a passage;
- construction of loose sentences;
- ignorance of common literary terms;
- ignorance of functions of clauses;
- mindless lifting of portions of the set passages;
- inability to replace words as used in the passage.
SUGGESTED REMEDIES
- Candidates should be more careful with their spelling, punctuation, grammar etc.
- Candidates should learn the basic grammatical structures of English Language.
- Candidates should acquaint themselves with the techniques for answering questions.
- Candidates should learn the formal features of the various types of composition i.e. informal letter, formal letter, article, speech and story writing.
- Candidates should inculcate the habit of reading wide with a view to improving their vocabulary.
- Candidates should practise essay writing regularly.
- Candidates should understand the demands of questions before answering them.