Appraising Cameroon Students Communicative Competence in English

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume VI, Issue III, March 2022 | ISSN 2454–6186

Appraising Cameroon Students Communicative Competence in English

Jean Désiré Banga Amvéné
Department of Subjects Didactics, University of Yaounde 1, Cameroon

Abstract: Despite the adoption of the competency-based approach and the establishment in Cameroon of the teaching of English right from primary schools some twenty years ago, communicating in English is still a difficult task among French-speaking students. The present survey shows that, out of seventy-two students cumulating at least nine years of English studies, only three were able to prove themselves competent in an elementary communication situation that required them to introduce themselves by correctly forming five sentences indicating the following: name, age, date and place of birth, number of years they had been studying English. It seems therefore, that the teaching of communicative English may not have been effective in the Cameron education system whose lack of internal efficiency is also confirmed.

Keywords: Cameroon Students, Competency-based approach, communicative approach, communicative competence, English, metalanguage.

I. INTRODUCTION

A. Context

The State of Cameroon has been facing a major cultural challenge: rooting French-speaking youth in the local culture by building their communication skills in local languages threatened with extinction, then opening them up to the world by developing their communication skills in English, one of the two official languages of the country. Thus in 2003, the government through the Minister of National Education made the teaching of English compulsory throughout the primary cycle and established a national bilingualism week. Next, at the start of the 2008/2009 school year, the government instituted the teaching of national languages at the secondary cycle and opened a Department of Cameroonian languages and cultures at the Higher Teacher Training College of the University of Yaoundé 1. Then Cameroon education system adopted a new curricular paradigm, the Competency-based Approach (CBA), which seeks to make use of subjects’ contents as resources for the adequate treatment of life situations, as pointed out by [11] and [9]. Language teaching would therefore, be about giving students the necessary grammatical and notional resources that could enable students to communicate properly in real-life situations. However, it appears that instead of learning to communicate in English, students have been learning to talk about English, that is, metalinguistic competence

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