Zimbabwe Grade 3 Curriculum - English

This curriculum emphasizes the development of four basic English language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, with additional focus on visual, manual, and tactile skills to accommodate diverse learning needs. It utilizes ICTs to enhance learning and prepares learners to use English across the curriculum and for lifelong learning. The curriculum promotes communicative and functional approaches to language acquisition.

Learning Areas:

The curriculum focuses on developing competencies in the following learning areas:

• Listening/Observing: This includes following instructions, responding to questions and statements, retelling utterances, and writing dictated words.
• Speaking/Signing: This involves participating in public speaking and debates, using appropriate registers for different language functions, describing various things (people, objects, places, scenes, processes, and events), pronouncing words clearly, sustaining discussions on various topics, and dramatizing texts.
• Reading/Signing: This includes reading fluently for leisure and comprehension, inferring word meanings from context, and reading aloud with clarity and expression.
• Writing/Brailling: This focuses on legible and neat writing, grammatically correct sentences (SVO structure), correct punctuation, accurate spelling, interpreting and amplifying information for continuous writing, paragraphing, using varied vocabulary and appropriate registers, and writing different types of compositions (narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expository, factual, reports, letters).

Supporting Language Structures:

The curriculum incorporates various language structures, including:

• Nouns (proper, common, compound, collective; masculine, feminine, neutral; countable, uncountable; singular, plural; concrete, abstract)
• Pronouns (personal, impersonal, possessive, relative, demonstrative, reflexive)
• Opposites/Antonyms
• Synonyms
• Similes
• Verb Tenses (simple present, past, future; continuous present, past, future; participles)
• Adverbs and Adverbial Clauses
• Adjectives (comparative and superlative forms)
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions (coordinating and subordinating)
• Punctuation Marks
• Quantifiers
• Intensifiers
• Cause and Effect Structures
• Question Tags
• Modals
• Conditional Clauses
• Direct and Indirect Speech
• Active and Passive Voice
• Word Formation (suffixes and prefixes)
• Other structures (e.g., Unless/in spite of/despite the fact that, Neither...nor/either...or, Abbreviations and acronyms)

Textbooks:

Some textbooks mentioned for the Zimbabwe Grade 3 English curriculum include Ventures Primary English and PlusOne English.

Assessment:

Assessment is both continuous (listening and speaking) and summative (reading and writing). A final national exam is administered at the end of Grade 7, with components covering comprehension, language usage and structure, guided compositions, and summary writing. The continuous assessment contributes 30% and the summative assessment contributes 70% to the final Grade 7 mark. A learner profile, compiled by teachers, documents soft skills and other competencies not assessed through traditional methods.