Concern over slipping school standards

The Swazi government has launched an inquiry into why students finishing primary school are performing less well on test scores. The overall pass rate declined by just under one percent to 88.07 percent this year, but among the surprises was that students were having difficulty mastering the grammar and written skills needed to communicate in their mother tongue, SiSwati. More students failed SiSwati - just over 11 percent - than English. About 13 percent failed science and mathematics, and 14 percent failed social studies, but these are not essential 'pass' subjects and the students will proceed to secondary school despite poor test results. The Ministry of Education said it would withhold comment until it had reviewed the findings of the commission of inquiry into the test results, whose members have not yet been appointed. However, educationalists IRIN contacted had definite ideas as to why the students' performance hade declined. "Swazis are linguistic people - we are great talkers and communicators. But ours is a musical language, whose music must be heard and spoken, and can be lost in print. It is also a language that is spoken with accompanying hand gestures, and these do not translate onto the page. Most Swazis feel uncomfortable reading and writing SiSwati - it's not natural to them," said Joy Ngidi, a primary school teacher in Matsapha, about 30 km east of the capital, Mbabane. She pointed out that sales of the SiSwati edition of the daily Times of Swaziland are only a fraction of the sales of the English language newspaper. But Ngidi could not account for earlier generations of Swazis who performed better in SiSwati tests. Ngidi's colleague, Joshua Dlamini, felt that "the Western media influence is robbing students of what little language and written communications skills they have. The technology of CDs, radio, TV and DVD viewing is replacing reading as a pastime - students go to the library to do research for school assignments, but don't check out books to bring home to read." For years, the head of the Swaziland Exams Council, which administers the tests, has pushed for the end of English as a pass subject, arguing that it was unfair to burden Swazi students for whom English was a rarely spoken second language. But the new troubles students are facing with their SiSwati tests indicate a wider failing in linguistic studies.