Performance in English essay tests by L1 and L2 speakers of English: a study of selected JHS in Tema

This study compared the academic performance of students who have English as first language and those who have it as a second language in five basic schools in Tema, Ghana. Text results of Hundred pupils selected from two public, two faith – based and one private school were compared employing a quantitative approach that applied Fisher’s exact test analysis. Initial results showed that there was little difference among the scores of pupils irrespective of the schools they attended as determined by the Chi square analysis that showed a significance level of 3% (X2 = 3.404, p = 0332). However, Faith Based schools recorded a slightly greater percentage of (n=85%) compared to Public scholls (n = 72.5%) and PS (n=75%). Secondly, the study found that pupils from mixed ethnicity parents were more likely to have English as L1 than those from parents of the same ethnicity as determined by the Fisher’s exact test (p< 0.0001) which showed a significance level of 5%. It also appears that monolingualism is the preferred choice in most families at home as the data recorded very low multilingual language use at home.