Teaching and Assessment of Kenya's Indigenous Languages in the Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC)

The chapter focuses on sampled education commissions in Kenya that recommended teaching and learning indigenous languages and if clear policy framework existed for implementation. With adoption of competency-based curriculum (CBC), indigenous languages are supposed to be taught from primary to secondary schools. However, there are existing challenges in the implementation such as inadequately skilled human resources, lack of teaching and learning resources, unspecified teaching and assessment methods, and also existing teachers are retrained within a short period. The chapter recommends an adoption of immersion strategy for teaching these indigenous languages and also strengthening formative and summative assessment by including topical tasks, namely: receptive, interactive, extended productive monologues and socio-cultural reading and writing. These can be achieved through benchmarking with successful immersion programs in the world that can be contextually adopted in the CBC system of education.