Zimbabwe Grade 7 Subjects - English Language

This course covers the learning and teaching of English, focusing on its importance as a tool for communication and overall development. It utilizes learner-centered and interactive activities to help students understand linguistic concepts and their practical application. The curriculum emphasizes the four basic language skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing, along with visual, manual, and tactile skills to accommodate diverse learning needs. It also incorporates cross-cutting themes such as gender, children's rights, child protection, disaster risk management, financial literacy, HIV and AIDS education, heritage studies, environmental issues, and others.

Listening and Observing

Students are expected to develop attentive listening skills for effective communication. This includes following instructions, responding to questions and statements, retelling utterances, and writing dictated words.

Speaking and Signing

Students are expected to develop fluent speaking skills for effective communication. This includes 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 and Signing

Students are expected to develop reading fluency and comprehension skills. This includes reading a variety of texts for both enjoyment and understanding, inferring word meanings from context, and reading aloud with clarity and expression.

Writing and Brailing

Students are expected to develop accurate and legible writing skills. This includes writing grammatically correct sentences, using correct punctuation, spelling accurately, interpreting and rearranging information for coherent writing, organizing work into paragraphs, using varied vocabulary and appropriate registers, writing different types of compositions (narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expository, factual, reports, letters), and producing creative writing pieces.

Comprehension

Students are expected to develop comprehension skills that enable them to understand texts on various subjects within their vocabulary and cognitive development. This includes drawing inferences, skimming and scanning for information, following sequences of events or arguments, understanding how language connects ideas, inferring contextual meanings of words and phrases, answering comprehension questions in complete sentences, suggesting suitable titles, analyzing and evaluating information, and summarizing texts.

Supporting Language Structures

The curriculum covers 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 and continuous forms of present, past, and future; participles)
• Adverbs and Adverbial Clauses
• Adjectives (comparative and superlative forms)
• Prepositions
• Conjunctions (coordinating and subordinating)
• Punctuation
• 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)

Assessment

Assessment is both continuous (through classroom activities and assignments) and summative (through a National Examination at the end of Grade 7). The National Examination consists of two papers:

• Paper 1: Multiple-choice questions focusing on register, comprehension, and language usage and structure.
• Paper 2: Guided compositions, comprehension, and summary writing.