Art of writing must be treated seriously

While English as policy is being emphasised as a language of instruction in the current Rwandan school system, the volume of challenges encountered in its use have not gone unnoticed. English as any other modern language has four acquired skills that have to be balanced for proficiency to exist with the major stakeholders placing emphasis on speaking but my focus today will be on writing. Writing as a skill can open various opportunies to those with advanced capabilities, but it is the very basic forms that are providingthe biggest challenge within our schools. Take a casestudy around the country and you will find that the majority of students from Primary Four to Senior Six have problems not only in writing comprehensible grammatical sentences but also in the usage of basic aspects like letter construction. This goes down to the effort placed on such a discipline during the early years of education. In our Rwandan context, pupils in the first year of primary start with chalk and small chalk cards as primary material for writing. In the second year of primary, pens are introduced with little emphasis on letter construction and organisation. This runs through to the sixth year and then to secondary. However, teachers in lower primary are being taken through training by the school-based mentors on how to deal with such small yet important challenges. I am hopeful this will reap results sooner than later. The writer is a school-based mentor