Practice the language by speaking it. Read widely in the language. Read good novels, magazines, newspapers etc.
It has three papers; Paper 1, Paper 2 and Paper 3.
PAPER 1
It has three areas of concern.
CLOZE TEST (10Marks)
You need to read widely and learn various ways of constructing coherent sentence structures. You must learn common prepositions and how are used, word construction (like making nouns out of verbs), common adjectives among other parts of speech.
ORAL SKILLS (30Marks)
This part contains questions on speaking and listening skills. To pass in this section, you must gather knowledge in the following areas:
Public speaking: preparing to speak, presentation skills, audience analysis, non-verbal cues.
Oral poetry: Concept of rhymes, rhyme schemes, rhythm maintenance, sound patterns (consonance, assonance and alliteration).
Negotiation skills
How to take part in a discussion effectively
Conversations: official, informal, police statements, greetings and their replies, common courtesy words such as excuse me, sorry, thank you etc.
For this section you can use Excelling in English as your major reference book. Other books like Test it Fix It, Golden Tips, Higher flyer are also good. Excelling in English textbook gives short notes on various oral presentation skills as well as concise and clear examples.
At the beginning of each topic in excelling in English, there are oral skills notes. Read and make short notes on all oral skills in form one to four. Keep these notes in a single notebook for easy reference.
FUNCTIONAL WRITING (20Marks)
It is writing meant to fulfill real communication purposes like communicating a request, documenting proceedings of a meeting (minutes), inquiry, keeping a diary among others.
There are two types of functional writing: Formal and informal.
Falling under those two, there are up to 28 testable functional writing items including: Minutes, Notices (Meetings, Agenda, public notices and warnings), and Reports (Confidential, Routine and special reports), Letters (Business and friendly), Notes of condolences, thank you, congratulations and appreciation; internal memos, speeches, e-mails, personal journals, diary, and apology, diary, and letters among others.
Reference books for this section could include: Golden Tips, Excelling in English book 3 and book 4, Gateway English, Test It Fix It, and New Integrated English.
Paper 2:
Familiarize yourself with the set text. This will help you locate and analyze excerpts effectively. Take one hour a day to go through a chapter in the set book expected for the excerpt.
You may use the guide books you have to update your knowledge of the story line and themes. Some guide books offer in-depth analysis of various characters, themes and stylistic devices that will help you answer questions effectively.
Use poetry handbook to help you learn methods of analyzing poems. Oral literature notes are also found in Excelling in English.
Remind yourself of how to summarize paragraphs and how to paraphrase sections of essays. In summary, you must learn to identify the main ideas presented and put them in your own words. Paraphrasing simply means rewriting the ideas in your own words.
The New Integrated English book1 to 4 has wonderful grammar lessons, just like those presented in Excelling in English; go through them more often to get complete mastery of them.
PAPER 3:
Think through different imaginative stories which you may want to write about. Let your friends or teacher go through them and give comments.
To learn how to write good imaginative essays, read the stories in the course books.
They may test you on argumentation in the first essay; ensure you have good mastery of emerging trend in governance, environmental conservation Women and youth empowerment, technological advancements-applications of ICT, among others. Most of the topics are presented as topics in various class texts like Excelling in English, New Integrated English and also in Golden Tips.
Learn how to write essays based on set text using the 4 points 3 marks each approach: This is the easiest approach to this area.
To get you started, you can down load free KCSE KNEC Past papers here as well as KCSE MOCK Past papers.
Excerpt from the book “Smart Way to Improve your Mind and Grades” .Quoted with permission.
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