Poor Spelling - Bane Of BECE Candidates
The Chief Examiners’ Report on the 2008 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) has singled out poor spelling as a major cause of the poor performance by candidates in the examination.
It has, therefore, suggested that English Language teachers in basic schools should intensify “the good old practice of spelling drills” in all schools.
The report further suggested that there should be dictation of single words and short passages during English Language lessons, stressing, “This will improve spelling.”
It also recommended that teachers should use the English Language as the medium of instruction in all schools to help candidates to improve on their command of the language.
These were among varied suggestions and recommendations by the chief examiners of the various subjects in a report published by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC).
The report described the level of spelling during the 2008 BECE English Language paper as “terrible” and cited examples of some of the mis-spelt words as ‘grease’ instead of “grace”, ‘continoue’ instead of “continue” and ‘comppt’ instead of “computer”.
It said a lot of candidates could not show thorough understanding of the questions and thereby wrote ‘shallow’ compositions.
According to the report, some candidates used prepositions wrongly and, therefore, it recommended that conscious efforts must be made to teach homonyms and homographs.
The report further recommended that teachers of English should try to inculcate the habit of reading in pupils, stressing, “If they have interest and love for reading, it will go a long way to improve their spoken and written English.”
It also recommended that the Ghana Education Service (GES) should make it a policy to organise in-service training courses to equip teachers with current demands in the teaching of English Language.
The report stressed that the practice where any teacher in the Arts or the Social Sciences was assigned the teaching of English Language should be discouraged.
The report also quoted the chief examiner in Mathematics as recommending that drills in arithmetic computation without the use of calculators should be re-inforced and that teachers needed to give candidates more exercises to build up their confidence in solving mathematical problems.
Touching on general weaknesses, the chief examiners bemoaned poor handwriting, lack of in-depth knowledge of subjects and candidates’ failure to follow instructions such as numbering of work.
Story : Severious Kale Dery Share Your Thoughts on this article Name Email Location Comments Graphic Ghana may edit your comments and not all comments will be published