Abstract
This paper examines the English spoken productions of primary school teachers and their graduating pupils in Cameroon, with the aim of checking how much English is learnt by the time the primary child moves to the secondary education level. The data came from classroom observations, tape-recording of lessons as they were taught and a spoken performance test taken by the pupils. The work is couched within the structural approach to phonology, and the error analysis and the contrastive methods of analysis were used to describe the data. A number of interesting findings were obtained. First, francophone primary school teachers in Cameroon are not proficient in English and they cannot therefore teach the subject even though they were summoned to do it. Second, many francophone primary school pupils learn very little English and, as a result, secondary school teachers have no choice but to start the English subject from scratch. Characteristically, these pupils’ spoken productions exhibit various features at the level of consonants like substitution, cluster simplification and realisation of silent letters. At the vocalic level, spelling pronunciation causes monophthongs to be replaced by foreign sounds, and diphthongs and triphthongs to be monophthongised. Most interestingly, vowel nasalization is systematic in specific contexts.
Highlights
Since Reunification in 1961, Cameroon has been implementing an official policy of French-English bilingualism and, close to 60 years today, the vast majority of Francophone Cameroonians cannot still function in Basic English
The purpose of this study, which focuses on English in primary school, is to check how much English is learnt at the phonological level by the time a Cameroonian child leaves primary school
The following four questions are set to guide the research exercise: What are the characteristic phonological features of the English of primary school teachers? What are the characteristic phonological features of the English of primary school leavers? From the features observed, can it be said that primary school leavers in Cameroon meet Government’s expectations? Can it be said that Government is serious about its official French-English bilingualism policy? The work comprises three main sections entitled background to the study, methodology, and data analysis
Summary
Since Reunification in 1961, Cameroon has been implementing an official policy of French-English bilingualism and, close to 60 years today, the vast majority of Francophone Cameroonians cannot still function in Basic English. After these decisions and measures are implemented fully, every Cameroonian citizen would be bilingual in French and English and every pupil who leaves primary education would have learned enough French and English to be capable of following courses taught in either official language at the secondary education level. With this target in mind, education officials set the general objectives of the teaching of English in Class Six as follows:. Government officials decided that the communicative teaching method was to be applied and relevant structural features were to be taught, as Table 1 (MINEDUC [1], p. 32) shows: Communicative objectives Talking about one’s present actions
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