艺术与社会科学杂志

Suitability of Communicative Approach in Teaching English Language in Tanzania Secondary Schools

Abstract

Eliakimu Sane and Rafiki Y Sebonde

As a strategy to improve the English language proficiency in secondary school, Tanzania issued a communicative competence based English syllabus in 2005. This syllabus that accommodates Communicative Approach in teaching and learning process was introduced to replace the old syllabus which was claimed to be structure based and hence could not produce communicative competent learners. This study investigated the suitability of the Approach in Tanzania and revealed the practical problems encountered by both teachers and students over the use of the Approach in Tanzania. It revealed that the learning environment in Tanzania does not support the use of the Approach because there is a big number of students in classes, a large number of people use Kiswahili and Ethnic Community Languages as their languages of communication, just few students use English only when they are in school environment and most secondary schools use Kiswahili language as their language of communication, and even teachers in these schools use Kiswahili when teaching in the classes though the stipulated language of instruction is English. And finally the researchers conclude by arguing that there is a need of reintroducing the former methods that were used to teach English before CA.