Communicative Language Teaching Revisited: Exploring The Teacher’s Role Towards Developing Writing Skills With A Special Focus on Marakwet District, Kenya

Abstract

The rapid growth of the world into a global village has necessitated the need to acquire communicative skills that are commensurate with the dynamic language needs. English is one of the languages of international communication and whose proficiency avails a whole world of opportunities to an individual. Over the past years, the performance of English language at Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examinations in Marakwet District, Kenya, has been on a steady decline. This is of great concern since without the proper writing skills, these students are likely to miss out on the benefits that accrue with proper communication in the said lingua franca. In a bid to develop writing skills in the area, the author of this paper carried out a study aimed at investigating the use of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach in the development of writing skills in secondary schools in the larger Marakwet District. Specifically, the research sought to expore the teacher‟s roles in the use of CLT to help learners acquire writing skills. Anchoring the discussions on selected tenets of Stephen Krashen‟s Monitor Model of Second Language Acquisition: The Input Hypothesis, this paper argues that teachers should consider students to be at the centre of teaching writing skill, should be the ones designing writing activities for students and should strongly encourage the students to learn by themselves through their own efforts to communicate in writing. This is because from the CLT perspective, the teacher is no longer the dominant figure but a facilitator and guide. The study adopted a descriptive survey design. The study population constituted 33 secondary schools. Simple random sampling was used to select 11 schools based on divisions in the district which formed 33% of the study population. Purposive sampling was also used to select 11 teachers of English from the selected schools out of the 41 teachers of English in the whole district. Simple random sampling was also used to select 121 form three students from the 11 schools selected out of the total population of 404 form three students in the selected schools. The questionnaire, interview and observation schedules were used to collect data. Data collected was analysed descriptively using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS). This paper recommends a shift in focus from teacher-centred to student-centred. The stakeholders should also endeavour to allocate more time to writting skills and introduce regular easy writing competitions. The discussions in this paper are of great benefit not only to English as Second Language (ESL) teachers and learners but also teacher trainers and curriculum developers improving writing skills in English language.