You must have read or heard the saddening news of how more than half of the candidates who sat for the May/June 2015 West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE) failed English. Only 616, 370 (38.68 per cent) of the 1, 593, 442 candidates got credit pass. That is to say, 61.32 per cent failed. Although WAEC Head of National Office, Mr. Charles Eguridu saw the 38.68 percent pass as a ‘slight improvement’ on last year’s examination, which recorded 529,425 (representing 31.28 per cent), the fact remains that the result is a far cry from our expectation as parents.
I don’t know when and how the situation will improve. I am not sure if WAEC will not end up recording far worse result or, at best, a ‘slightly improved’ one this time, next year, but my experience with SS1, SS2 and SS3 students who I was privileged to teach English during this year’s annual “Vacation School” of Deeper Life Bible Church, served as a great eye-opener to me, on why students fail English Language.
Usually, the students that make up the ‘holiday coaching’ set are drawn mainly from within and outside the church. And this time around, they all came in large numbers, simply because the subject teaching and the accompanying entrepreneurial and skills-acquisition trainings in trades like sign writing, Internet blogging, shoe mending, electric generator repairs, shoe polish making, basic sewing, tiling, Chapman making, soap-making, commercial photography, coconut chips making, dyeing, welding, fish, snail, rabbit-farming, etc. were all done, free of charge, as has always been the case, to make them self-reliant.
But this year’s which ended last week, precisely on Thursday, August 20, and in which I taught the aforementioned classes of students English made me to know that a typical Nigerian child studying or reading English has problem in four main areas, namely: (a) pronunciation and word/sentence stress (b) use of appropriate English vocabulary and grammatical expressions (c) use of correct punctuation marks and (d) comprehension, essay writing and summary.
It follows, therefore, that every attempt should be made by parents, the classroom teacher and concerned education authorities to see that a child is well grounded in these four main areas before he or she is allowed to sit for WAEC.
Now, I don’t know how many English Language teachers, in both public and private secondary schools, have access to WAEC examiners’ yearly reports, to help them adequately prepare the students they are teaching, for WASSCE or GCE. More than releasing WASSCE results, I will urge WAEC to make that available to subject teachers every year.
But then teachers also have their own problems to deal with. When a teacher makes learning content or curriculum rather than child-centred, he or she is not going to be of much help to the child. This is because while the teacher is under pressure to ensure that the syllabus or whatever for the term or academic session is ‘covered,’ a slow-learning child, and there are many of them in our public and private schools, may not understand the concepts taught, muchless be able to apply them to a given situation within that period.
Recommendation: every classroom teacher should make learning child and not curriculum-centred. Let your student’s learning pace determine your teaching pace. Lastly, make your teaching relevant and practical to the child’s everyday need within and outside the classroom. One thing the students I taught confessed to me that they enjoyed is their ability, at the end of the day, to recognize and correctly identify different parts of English speech – noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction, etc. – in the books they are reading, be it Chemistry, Economics, Physics, Biology textbooks or novels, their ability to know, through the deployment of their knowledge of English grammatical structures/patterns that I taught them, rather than by definition, when words like “round” and “clean” are used as noun and when they are used as adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, etc, in a sentence.
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