ANALYSIS: Teaching English

Why the language policy is failing rural children

Kampala, Uganda | MEDADI SSENTANDA | Uganda’s language policy requires that rural schools should choose a dominant local language to use as the language of learning and teaching for the first three years of primary school while English is taught as a subject. The fourth year of schooling is a transitional year in which English as the language of learning and teaching is introduced. English then becomes the medium of instruction.

In areas where it’s not easy to choose a dominant language, as is the case in urban schools, English as the medium of instruction is recommended.

We investigated the circumstances under which children learn and acquire English in central Uganda’s rural Rakai district.

We set questions related to the learning and teaching support materials for English, the challenges rural Ugandan learners face in learning English, the differences between government and private schools on vocabulary teaching and learning as well as opportunities available for learners to acquire English in rural schools.

We conducted the study in 2012 in four rural schools. The results of this study are still relevant because the language-in-education policy has not changed. Teacher training and curricula are also still the same.

We found that learners faced various challenges in learning and acquiring English. It was difficult for them to reach the vocabulary levels set out by the country’s National Curriculum Development Centre. For example, they are expected to learn at least 800 English words after three years.

The essence of the mother tongue policy was partly to enhance the teaching and learning of English in Uganda. But our findings point to a host of difficulties faced by learners in private and government schools. We conclude that Uganda needs to rethink how English is taught in rural contexts. In addition, the time of transition to English as a language of learning and teaching should be reconsidered.

A difficult subject

Studies show that vocabulary is a crucial element in reading and comprehension. According to some studies, learners of English need knowledge of the 3000 most frequent words to read and understand graded readers.

But nobody has studied whether that is realistic in poorly resourced learning environments, such as those in Uganda.

The curriculum development centre also considers “words” when speaking about vocabulary learning. However, studies refer instead to word families – “the word and all its inflected and derived forms”, counted as one.

In Africa, there are numerous studies of language-in-education policies. But there is a shortage of research on vocabulary learning in both first and second languages.

As far as we know ours is the first study in Uganda that evaluated the number of words children acquire in the process of learning English.

How English is taught

The curriculum development centre set guidelines on how English should be taught from grade 1 to grade 3. It suggested presenting at least five new words every day, using short dialogues, presenting new sentence structures, pictures and wall charts, and using songs, games, acting, rhymes, exercises and speech.

The centre discourages teachers from using learners’ mother tongues while teaching English – an approach not supported by research.

The centre expects the curriculum to be well-structured and supported by appropriate materials. But teachers in our study viewed the curriculum as poorly structured, repetitive and inadequate. They said they did not have the right materials and that learners were not able to learn the desired vocabulary in each school year.

We did not see recommended methods like role play and speeches being used. Instead, teachers asked learners to read after them and to chorus.

Another challenge we encountered related to training. The National Curriculum Development Centre recommends a one-teacher-one-classroom policy. So there is no specialist English teacher for grades 1 to 3.