ELTAN Organises Workshop for Members

The English Teachers’ Association of Nigeria, Ikorodu branch, has organised a one-day workshop for its members.

The workshop held at Oriwu College, Ikorodu Lagos on Wednesday 4th March, 2020. And it was attended by teachers of English Studies across Ikorodu Zone.

The President of the association, Mr Munebi Lawrence, welcomed members to the workshop. He disclosed that the workshop aimed at improving the performance of the SS3 students preparing for the May/June examination.

He also expressed his delight at the volume of participants at the workshop.

“I want to enjoin you all to leverage this opportunity to learn things that will help improve your performance in the class and the performance of your students in the coming examinations,” he stated.

“As we all know that it is necessary we intensify effort to achieve excellent results this year,” he continued.

He added that teachers would receive the blame if the students’ performance is poor.

The workshop was divided into two sessions. Mr Olayera Muyiwa, a WAEC examiner, facilitated the first session. Mr Bolaji Ezekiel, a senior Lecturer in the Department of English, Adeniran Ogunsanyan College of Education, facilitated the second session.

In his training session, Mr Muyiwa spoke on the topic: “A Critical Appraisal and Review of the Strategies for the Teaching and Learning of English Language as a Subject in Secondary Schools”.

After explaining the importance of English Studies to the academic life of the students, he analysed the reasons why students fail essay writing, comprehension and summary questions.

According to the Examiner, prominent among the factors responsible for this failure is poor preparation for the exam.

Mr Muyiwa explained further that poor grammatical constructions, lack of understanding of questions, mixing of homophones, wrong spellings, violation of concord, poor organisation and lack of logical presentation could be responsible for failure in essay writing.

He therefore buttressed his points with plenty of examples for the teachers to learn from.

He noted the possibility of students scoring zero in summary writing. He stressed that many students answered summary with a method they are not good at.

“From my years of experience as a WAEC Examiner, I can tell you authoritatively that many students don’t know how to use preamble method,” he stated.

“This is one of the reasons they score zero in that part,” he added.

In addition, he stated that writing more than the required number of sentences, mindless listing of answers and lack of adequate knowledge of topic sentences could cause failure.

He however suggested some solutions to the weaknesses identified.

He said teachers should encourage students to write essays consistently. He equally suggested a review of the syllabus to conform with 21st century English. He therefore urged teachers to attend training regularly.

The second facilitator, Mr Bolaji Ezekiel, trained the teachers in Oral English. He spoke on the topic: “Why Oral English could be Difficult and What you can Do to be Good at it”.

He began his training by explaining the category of users of English: Inner Circle, Outter Circle and Expanding Circle.

“Native speakers of English are better at pronunciation of English words than those who use it as a second language,” he said.

He stressed that the way students pronounce words affects the way they write. He stated that students could write list and wit instead of least and with, due to poor pronunciation.

With the aid of an audio-visual material, Mr Bolaji clearly explained all the 44 sounds in English. He equally explained some other aspects of phonology, such as stress placement and intonation.

Concluding his session, he encouraged teachers to enure they pronounce words in the right way.