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Title
Functional aspects of the written English of West African Secondary School leavers |
Full text
http://dspace.unijos.edu.ng/handle/10485/1547 |
Date
1998 |
Author(s)
Quarcoo, Emmanuel |
Abstract
For fulltext Contact: University of Jos, P.M.B.2084,Jos,Nigeria, e-mail: library@unijos.edu.ng - This thesis has three objectives in view. First, it investigates the proficiency with which West African School Leavers use English at the 'terminal point of their secondary education. Secondly, it examines the relationship between the annual statistics of performance released by the 'west African Examinations Council (WAEC) on the state of the language and compares the statistics with the candidates' ability to use certain specified resources in the English language. Finally, findings from each West African country under study are compared with those of the others to see whether what is taking place in one country is also happening in the others. Two hundred English language scripts containing candidates' responses to essay questions were collected from the WAEC offices in Accra (Ghana), Freetown (Sierra Leone), and Lagos (Nigeria). In addition, question papers from the WAEC 1978, 1980, 1982, 1983 and 1984 were randomly collected for content analysis. Three parameters were outlined for use in the analysis. In the first one, i.e. a socio- cultural analysis of the communication tasks assigned the candidates; it was found that the parochial contents of the questions asked confronted the students with contexts of situation they could not handle adequately. This affected their results. In the lexico-semantic analysis carried out on the scripts, it was found that no matter the context in which candidates used words, elementary rules governing degrees of formality in any communicative acts were ignored. Wrong expressions ranging from transliterations to jargons were used in all the three countries under study. These also affected the statistics of passes and failures in the examination. On the grammatical level it was found that candidates from the three countries encounter problems with the use of pre- positions and tenses. All the syntactic elements that are misused combined to ruin meaning. Finally it was noted that the annual statistics of the WAEC for the years 1979 to 1984 show that none of the three countries scored in stainine unit one but recorded an average failure rate of about 40%. This statistical, phenomenon is now conclusively corroborated in this study by the linguistic evidence. |
Subject(s)
West African Secondary School |
Language
en |
Publisher
University of Jos, Department of English |
Type of publication
Thesis or Dissertation |
Repository
Jos - University of Jos
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Added to C-A: 2016-07-21;07:34:33 |
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