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