Zimbabwe Form 3 Curriculum - English

The English curriculum for Form 3 in Zimbabwe, as outlined by the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, emphasizes the development of four macro-skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The curriculum aims to equip learners with effective communication skills, promote lifelong learning, and prepare them for various roles in society.

Form 3 Learning Objectives:

By the end of Form 3, learners should be able to demonstrate proficiency in various aspects of the English language, including:

• Listening/Observing: Comprehending narrations, taking notes, summarizing information, drawing inferences, and evaluating content. They should also be able to follow complex directions and instructions, and actively participate in conversations and interviews.
• Speaking/Signing: Utilizing appropriate registers for different situations (formal, informal, expressing opinions, offering condolences, making complaints), describing processes and recounting events, and engaging in debates on national and international issues. Emphasis is placed on clear articulation, intonation, stress patterns, tone, and mood.
• Reading/Signing: Engaging in both intensive and extensive reading. Intensive reading focuses on answering recall questions, skimming, scanning, inferring information, understanding contextual meanings, note-making, and summarizing. Extensive reading involves characterizing and analyzing plots, settings, themes, and styles of various texts, including novels, short stories, and journals. Learners are also expected to utilize different reference sources effectively, including dictionaries, encyclopedias, and the internet.
• Writing/Brailing: Constructing different types of sentences, ensuring paragraph unity, utilizing appropriate registers, and employing discourse markers. They should be able to write narratives, descriptive pieces, informative texts, and argumentative compositions. Guided writing tasks include memos, letters, and articles. Supporting language structures are also emphasized, focusing on prefixes, suffixes, non-gradable adjectives, adverbials of time, place, manner, and reason.

Assessment:

Assessment in Form 3 English includes both continuous and summative evaluations. Continuous assessment comprises speaking, reading, writing, and project work, each contributing 10% towards the final grade. The summative assessment (70% of the final grade) consists of two papers:

• Paper 1 (Composition): Focuses on various composition types, including narrative, descriptive, informative, argumentative, and discursive writing, as well as guided writing tasks based on provided information.
• Paper 2 (Comprehension, Summary, and Supporting Language Structures): Assesses comprehension skills through prose passages, summary writing, and context-based questions on supporting language structures.

The curriculum also integrates cross-cutting themes such as ICT, gender, children's rights, disaster risk management, and environmental issues into the learning process through selected texts, projects, and assignments.