Feed A Hungry Mind

Hello again, and I hope this finds you well.

Summer has arrived in England with the last few weeks of the school year playing out. Rwanda has now adopted a similar school year, and the primary schools close in mid-July with the new school year starting again in September. Tanzania retains the calendar year, and its mid-year long break which started on 31^st May ends on 3^rd July. The school year will end in November.

The end-of-year and end-of-primary national exams for Primary 6 take place in Rwanda in mid-July. That is then the end of primary education for those pupils. Of great interest to us are the P6 classes in Gasabo primary school who have been pupils of Claude for English lessons since they started school in P1.

Claude has used our New Original English Course (NOEC) with his pupils from P1. His pupils have enjoyed learning from the books since day one, and we had reports of them showing off their command of English to older siblings who weren’t so proficient, and amusing their parents at home trying to teach them English. This has progressed over the years. Since P4 the pupils have had all their other lessons through the medium of English. The teachers of those other subjects welcome Claude’s pupils as the first cohort to whom they really can teach exclusively in English. In other years there is a lot of Kinyarwanda used to convey the lesson and then notes are copied from the board in English so that the pupils have a record. Claude’s pupils are admired as an ‘island of good English language’, as Damian recently described them.

As I’ve written about before, the NOEC books teach the sentence patterns and structures which form the English language, and concentrate the vocabulary on the most used words in the language. The teaching methods are set out for the teachers in the books, and the pupils learn by practice and usage in ‘action chains’; this means they ‘see the meaning’ from the teacher’s introduction and demonstration, and then they practise the language by doing things to show their understanding of the correct use of the language. The books continue with stories which are set in the African context, are beautifully illustrated to help with understanding, and which are variously funny, exciting and interesting. Writing is introduced with strictly guided exercises (e.g. filling in the blanks) to less guided exercises (e.g. retelling the story by using a sentence to summarise each paragraph). The sentence patterns and structures learned are constantly revised and used, and so the books develop excellent understanding and usage. In short the books combine to give a comprehensive course in the foundation of the English language, with skills in the four language areas of speaking, listening, reading and writing. But, and this has been our cross to bear in both Tanzania and Rwanda, the NOEC books do not follow the government syllabus. I have written many papers about the shortcomings and weaknesses in those syllabi, which I view as the root cause of the lack of good language learning in the government primary schools. This is particularly interesting in the case of Tanzania, as all Tanzania primary schools used the NOEC (when they were the New Oxford English Course) and following independence and the introduction of Universal Primary Education, although the NOEC were replaced by ‘home-grown’ textbooks, the syllabus was based on the contents of the NOEC. Over time with many changes the syllabus now bears little resemblance. Even though the syllabus was based on the contents of the NOEC, it took no regard of how the contents were introduced, used and developed. Conversely, Rwanda has no heritage of English teaching as French was its second language for many years until English was adopted after the genocide.

What is in place now is a series of text books, which do not form a comprehensive course, based on a syllabus which takes little account of how children learn, nor of the build-up of the English sentence patterns and structures, and also lacks the building blocks of constant revision and re-use. The latter is mainly because the syllabi adopt a topic-based approach, and so let the vocabulary dominate at the expense of sound language structure patterns.

So with this in mind, along the way Claude has had to use the government books in an attempt to give his pupils something of the government syllabus in order to ‘teach for the exams’. This has been unfortunate, although entirely understandable, as it has distracted the pupils from the NOEC, and introduced complicated language structures without a proper foundation. This has detracted from the flow of the NOEC, and, in the event has not paid off as the English exam results have not been extraordinary. Now with the P6 end-of-primary exams looming my personal interest is not so much in the results of the English exam but of the results in the other subjects and the overall performance of Claude’s P6 pupils. Those results in other subjects will depend on the quality of teaching of the subject content and the pupils’ understanding as much as on the pupils’ ability in English, but our work is always dependent on the specific context. The aim of the NOEC is to give a foundation in English so that the pupils’ future education can be enhanced.

In Kibara primary school teacher Josephine has used the NOEC books for many years teaching P1 and P2 pupils. Josephine was not trained as a teacher of English (in their training the student teachers choose a speciality) but through her use of the NOEC and the teaching methods set out in the Teacher’s Books, she has become an excellent teacher. The Sector Director of Education after visiting and observing classes awarded Josephine 93% for delivering the best class. He was observing classes in all subjects and was particularly impressed by Josephine and her pupils interacting in English throughout the lesson; something he had not seen in other classes and particularly with the young P1 and P2 pupils.

Not only are the NOEC books helping pupils to learn English, but their teachers are improving their English proficiency too. I have written before about teachers using the methodology they have experienced from the NOEC books in other subjects they teach.

In the field in Rwanda, Damian and Ivan take the lead. However, Ivan’s hip was broken in a mugging. The hip replacement operation was not a  success as he is constant pain and one leg is now shorter than the other. Ivan now has his post-operation x-rays and is seeking advice about the possibility of a second operation.

In Tanzania at the Bright English-medium school, the new classrooms for Standard 1 and 2 are being enjoyed. The classrooms are apart from the main school building and have their own outside space demarcated. This is beneficial for the young pupils to have their own play area, and means that lessons or part of lessons can easily take place outside if more space is needed or if the pupils need a quick break to revive their interest.

The new school year in Tanzania will begin in January 2024, and there are plans to start using the charity’s specially designed teaching materials for maths and for general skills’ development through a language awareness course. Training of the teachers in the use of these materials is scheduled to start soon.

Thank you again for your continued interest in our work in primary schools. We continue to follow our single aim of improving the learning of pupils through researched and tested methods of how children learn in line with their cognitive development and the development of skills. A necessary prerequisite of this is our work with teachers so that they learn good teaching methods and improve their subject knowledge.

Without your generous support our work would not be possible. Many, many thanks.

With all good wishes,

Katy