Primary School Leavers ' English Skills and their Adequacy for Knowledge Acquisition at Secondary School: The Case of Iringa Municipality
Abstract
This study presents an account of how primary school leavers ' level of English literacy affects their learning in English at secondary education level. It adopts CALLA2 , which is an instructional model for second/foreign language learners. A total of 40 Form I students in 4 secondary schools were sampled for the study. To obtain the data, 5-minute passage reading and 30-minute writing of their short history in English were used. One interesting finding is that 10/28 (35.7%) Form I students with SM3 background who were assigned to write their short history in English could neither complete nor write comprehensively. Again, when they were given a reading task, 8/28 (28.6%) could not complete and were apparently unable to read the text. Conversely, 12/12 (100%) Form I students with EM4 background who were tested for writing were able to complete writing their comprehensible short history texts, and all 12/12 (100%) who were assigned a reading task completed reading with clear comprehension. It was, therefore, concluded that there were problems associated with ELT5 in SM primary schools.
Keywords: English literacy, medium of knowledge acquisition, adequacy, primary school leavers
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