Emerging trends from data

This section describes the common trends that emerged from data with regards to participants’ responses to questions. The trends reflect the participants’ views (students, heads of departments, lecturers and course coordinators). The trends that emerged from the participants were:

4.9.1 Time

All participants were concerned about the time allocated to the English courses. It is also a worrying factor that lecturers mentioned that they teach for the examination because they are concerned that the syllabi will not be completed before the students write the examination. Namibia has been faced with students’ poor language proficiency problem since independence, and factors such as the inheritance of the language issues from schools, time to develop all four language skills in too large groups to pay attention to individuals are some of the challenges that hinder the teaching and learning of oral and writing skills.

4.9.2 Teaching methods

It was also noticed that the way students were taught in the classrooms does not enhance the students’ language proficiency. Firstly, students shouted out answers and lecturers did not point out mistakes made by students especially to correct sentence construction. It seemed lecturers taught as if they were teaching content subjects where one did not need to pay attention to issues such as concord, sentence construction, word order and so on. However, in a language teaching environment, these are the most important factors to pay attention to. Secondly, lecturers mostly used only study guides. Another trend which caused concern was the students making careless mistakes and not paying serious attention to what they said. For example, after an assignment had been marked and it was returned to the students to check the errors, instead of the students correcting such errors, he or she paid no attention to the marked errors, which in fact means students do not edit their work and certainly learn nothing from their marked assignments and the mistakes they made in them.

4.9.3 Syllabi and study guide

The syllabi lack a variety of activities which could overcome the students’ barriers to writing and speaking, especially at University A. Very few writing activities were found in the study guides. The most disturbing factor was that the syllabi are revised after every three years and lecturers are aware that students need to improve their English proficiency. Again, the syllabi do not have clear teaching objectives for teaching writing and speaking skills. If lecturers know how to approach a certain objective then some improvement would be evident.

4.9.4 Syllabi revision

The syllabi are revised after three years. Some lecturers, Heads of Departments and Course Coordinators indicated that they were involved in the revision of the syllabi and paid attention to the needs in the job market. As one Head of Departments mentioned, when students speak one understands what they want to convey - unlike when they write. The writing seemed to be the only problem this Head of Department was concerned with, and she was not worried about students’ English fluency and whether they were able to convey messages well. This implies that the Head of Department felt that oral skills are not a problem and could be ignored. This was also evident in one of the syllabi where oral presentation was done only once a semester and in some syllabi this did not take place at all.

4.9.5 Sitting in classrooms

One of the major trends that emerged from data is the seating of students in classrooms. Some students prefer to sit with and talk to someone who speaks the same language (not English). These are adult students and one cannot dictate where they should sit in class. It is also difficult for lecturers to know who speaks what language.

4.9.6 Basic grammar

It also emerged from data that students lack basic English skills. Students realised and mentioned that they needed more exercises or practical work to improve their English proficiency. Also some lecturers felt that the students’ English is passable although

inaccurate, which means as long as students pass there is no problem. All these trends can bar students from improving their writing and speaking skills and need to be addressed.

4.10 Summary

This chapter discusses the findings from data collected. Some insights were obtained from this research. Students still search for words when they speak. This was confirmed from data drawn from heads of departments and course coordinators indicating that students lack grammar proficiency in speaking and writing skills. When speaking, the language does not flow. Although the meaning is conveyed still the vocabulary is limited.

Students find it difficult to express themselves adequately, they do not use morphemes and lack strong syntax usage. From class observation, most of the answers from students are shouted out in a single word or every student shouts to give the answer and lecturers do not pay attention to what students say in terms of grammar accuracy. There is no proper control of how answers are articulated. Some syllabi concentrate mainly on basic English components such as parts of speech, writing essays and paragraph analysis while other syllabi concentrate on vocabulary building, reading, and speaking (presentations) leading to a high standard of English to be learned, but they lack practical activities that can help students overcome the barriers to learning English writing and speaking skills. Also, the time frame is very curtailed, especially regarding the courses that are offered for a semester only. The next chapter contains the summary, recommendations and conclusion.