Zambian Languages: Grades 8-9

This syllabus outlines the curriculum for Zambian Languages in Grades 8 and 9, focusing on developing learners' communication and life skills. The curriculum aims to equip learners with linguistic knowledge and skills to navigate real-life situations, emphasizing cultural heritage, critical thinking, and entrepreneurship.

Grade 8

• Listening and Speaking: Learners will identify facts and opinions in conversations, speeches, and meetings on issues like sanitation, hygiene, gender, and corruption. They will also participate in debates, develop plays, narrate stories, recite and create poetry, deliver speeches, and identify cultural practices.
• Entrepreneurship and Language: Learners will explore the importance of language in entrepreneurship, focusing on effective communication for creating products, jobs, and marketing.
• Reading: Learners will practice intensive reading for comprehension, focusing on analyzing facts, opinions, terminology, figures of speech, and themes. They will also practice extensive reading across different subjects using techniques like skimming and scanning, and develop referencing skills.
• Writing: Learners will write autobiographies, informal letters, narrative and explanatory essays, reports on events and activities, descriptions of sceneries, and maintain personal diaries. They will also create advertisements, notices, posters, and take notes during meetings.
• Language Structure: Learners will study noun classes, word building using prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, different types of nouns and pronouns, tenses, adverbs, compound words, direct and indirect speech, and idiophones. They will also practice translation techniques, including handling borrowed words.
• Literature: Learners will classify proverbs, analyze figures of speech (irony, simile, metaphor, hyperbole, euphemism), and analyze literary texts for characterization, plot, setting, and the writer's purpose.

Grade 9

• Listening and Speaking: Learners will judge implications and inferences in conversations, distinguish facts from opinions, recite praises, songs, and poems, and discuss aspects of different cultures.
• Reading: Learners will continue practicing intensive reading for comprehension and extensive reading using skimming and scanning techniques, comparing different texts.
• Writing: Learners will write unguided compositions, including expository, argumentative, and dialogue essays. They will also create advertisements, write reports, take minutes of meetings, write semi-formal and formal letters, interpret information from tables, charts, and diagrams, compose short text messages and emails, summarize texts, and make notes.
• Language Structure: Learners will derive nouns from verbs and vice-versa, associate idiophones and onomatopoeia with movement and condition, use different tenses, identify and use adverbial phrases, and practice direct and indirect speech in complex sentences and narratives.
• Translation: Learners will translate complex ideas, phrases, and terminologies from one language to another.
• Literature: Learners will form and express their own opinions, use literary terms in writing, and identify the writer's purpose and values.

This syllabus emphasizes an outcome-based approach, encouraging learners to apply their knowledge and skills to real-life situations. The curriculum integrates cross-cutting issues such as entrepreneurship, environmental education, and cultural heritage.