Falling standards of English language, parents have a role to play.

Parents and guardians have a major role to play in raising the standard of written and spoken English of students, a Deputy General Secretary of the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Mr John Nyoagbe, has said.

According to him, the burden of falling standard of English must not be put on teachers alone since they were playing their expected roles.

Mr Nyoagbe told the Daily Graphic English Language could not only be learnt "within the confines of the periods allocated on the time table in the classroom", hence the need for all to support in that direction.

The home, he said, could complement what happened in the school in many ways.

"The traditional Ghanaian practice is that some parents go out and return home with candies, pastries and bread for children. They can change that by bringing home simple supplementary readers so that the children can read them side by side with the textbooks," he said.

Mr Nyoagbe said that would go a long way to help students to comprehend the language, enrich their vocabulary and style of writing English.

As parents and guardians played their role, he suggested that teachers would revisit some of the old, but effective methods of teaching which impacted positively on children.

"Teachers themselves sometimes may have to revisit some of the old methods where you have to let the letters of the English alphabet contrast with the letters of the Ghanaian language alphabet. They are not necessarily the same, they overlap at certain points," he stated.

Mr Nyoagbe said teachers must also know how to get the sounds that went with the various letters; the consonants that were hard and those that were soft, among other things.

He said although English teachers might be teaching English reading skills, comprehension, summary, composition writing and helping students to know the elements of literature, the individual subject teacher and parents had a role to play too.

Participants at a national forum on the falling standard of English language, organised by the Ghana Education Service (GES), called for effective collaboration among the service, teachers and parents to improve written and spoken English in the country.

They requested the GES to organise refresher courses in English grammar for teachers, and asked the teachers to modify their teaching techniques.

The participants attributed the falling standard of English to the poor quality of teachers, the failure of many students to study English as a subject and the lack of effective teaching methods.

The aim of the forum was to find ways of arresting the falling standard of English in schools, as indicated by a GES research