An investigation in to the type of occupational french used by Kenyan and how it relates to the type of french taught at school

Abstract

In the introductory chapter, the research topic is defined and justified in the light of the national objectives of French teaching in the secondary schools. Chapter II gives the background to the teaching of French in Kenya: its introduction, its place on the curriculum and the evolution of the '0' and 'A'. level syllabuses with a description of the organisation of the corresponding examinations. Chapter III examines the methodology adopted to meet the objectives of the '0' level syllabus, and describes how the language skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing are introduced and developed. The research data commence with Chapter IV, which describes the selection of the sample from Kenyans using French in their jobs and the method used for the collection of data. The data collected on occupational French in the form of written documents and taped conversations, as well as the course "Pierre et Seydou" representing '0' level French, are analysed in Chapter V. This analysis is carried out at the syntactical and lexical levels of the language. For the analysis at the syntactical level, the Phrase Structure Model is adopted to determine the rules governing sentence structure, while at the lexical level the vocabulary is classified into different parts of speech. Chapter VI uses the results of these analyses to see how school French compares with occupational French. Chapter VII concludes by determining the relevance of school French to occupational French in the light of the comparison made in the previous chapter. It also gives some recommendations for increasing the relevance of school French, and ends with some suggestions for further research.