Candidates’ weaknesses were revealed in the three sections of the paper. These weaknesses included:

1. lack of expression to carry through their ideas;
2. poor understanding of the questions;
3. spelling errors;
4. ignorance of the difference between ‘singular’ and ‘plural’; ‘present tense’ and ‘past tense’;
5. inability to construct meaningful sentences;
6. indiscriminate use of  capital letter;
7. interchangeable use of phonetically similar words e.g. loose for lose; know for no, meat for meat etc;
8. providing answers that have no relationship to the questions;
9. inability to re-state in the candidate’s own words, ideas contained in a passage;
10. construction of loose sentences;
11. ignorance of common literary terms;
12. ignorance of functions of clauses;
13. mindless lifting of portions of the set passages;
14. inability to replace words as used in the passage.

SUGGESTED REMEDIES

1. Candidates should be more careful with their spelling, punctuation, grammar etc.
2. Candidates should learn the basic grammatical structures of English Language.
3. Candidates should acquaint themselves with the techniques for answering questions.
4. Candidates should learn the formal features of the various types of composition i.e. informal letter, formal letter, article, speech and story writing.
5. Candidates should inculcate the habit of reading wide with a view to improving their vocabulary.
6. Candidates should practise essay writing regularly.
7. Candidates should understand the demands of questions before answering them.