English language is a fulcrum to every student’s success and its omission from the result lamed the result, it is therefore sacrosanct to expose reasons why Students fail English Language WAEC 2019 as unveiled by the Council (WAEC). The article is tripartite, it has weaknesses, suggested remedies and candidates’ strength.
Candidates’ Weaknesses
The weaknesses observed include:
- mother tongue interference which resulted in transliteration;
- poor expression as a result of wrong concord, poor punctuation marks, wrong use of tenses, poor use of prepositions and articles;
- failure to grasp the requirements and demands of the questions attempted;
- inability to construct simple and correct sentences;
- poor knowledge of idioms and their meanings;
- illegible handwriting;
- spelling errors;
- poor knowledge of the basic rules of English grammar;
- mindless lifting of answers from set passages;
- use of text message abbreviations such as “u” for “you” “d” for “the”, etc;
- use of long, uncontrolled and ambiguous sentences;
- inability to infer meaning from the passages;
- wrong syllabication of words and wrong use of homonyms and homophones.
Suggested Remedies by the Council
The following recommendations were by put forward by the chief examiner so as to serve as a check for prospective candidates and subject teacher.
Candidates should:
- Endeavour to improve on their vocabulary and grammar in English Language through extensive reading
- Take time to understand the demands of questions before attempting to answer them
- Read through their works to correct spelling and grammatical mistakes before submitting their scripts
- Practise essay writing constantly
- Converse regularly using simple and correct English expressions
- Try to unlearn what they have learnt wrongly
Teachers should:
- Spend more time in teaching grammar topics and comprehension skills
- In addition to giving their students assignments frequently, teachers should also mark such assignments in order to help students identify and correct their mistakes
- Pay attention to spellings of words that can be confusing to students both in sound and spelling;
- Devise teaching methods that will cater for the various needs of their students
- Bear in mind that language is acquired outside of the classroom and learned in the classroom, thus, they should create real-life experiences in the classroom during their teaching sessions
- Regularly attend workshops and seminars that would keep them abreast of global best practices in the teaching of the English Language.
Schools should ensure that:
- Only qualified teachers are engaged to teach subject;
- Libraries are equipped with relevant books and materials that will aid the students academically.
Candidate’s Strengths
Many candidates:
- Demonstrated adherence to rubrics
- Showed improvement in their knowledge of the features of formal essay writing
- wrote full length essays
- Were able to identify the grammatical name and grammatical function of the expression given in question 6h
- Were able to give appropriate synonyms to the lexical items
- Presented their responses in the Summary Section in independent sentences without the use of preambles.
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