The investigation of narrative skills in children is significant in many respects; amongst other things, narratives can yield information about a child's use of decontextualised, literate language features (Curenton and Justice 2004) while simultaneously providing access to the child's level of competence concerning narrative-specific aspects. Narrative abilities have been linked to literacy development and academic achievement (Dickinson and Tabors 2001) and are often used to predict language progress (Botting, Faragher, Simkin, Knox and ContiRamsden 2001). Moreover, narrative skills constitute an area of verbal language development in which delays are difficult to compensate (Girolametto, Wiigs, Smyth, Weitzman and Pearce 2001, Manhardt andRescorla 2002). However, in multilingual settings the assessment of narrative skills cannot be restricted to language proficiency measurements in each of a child's languages. Rather, this assessment needs to include "linguistic descriptions of ethno-linguistic discourse patterns (contrastive rhetoric)" (Barnitz 1986:95) in order to assess the roles which cultural knowledge and language-specific narrative text structure elements play in the development of narrative skills in multilingual children. This article discusses the necessity to identify such language-specific elements of story structures. Empirical findings are presented which illustrate that 10-to 12-year-old children from Malawi exhibit narrative practices while they retell visually and aurally presented stories. It appears that these narrative practices are influenced by African folktales. The children's retellings in both Chichewa and English cannot simply be measured by canonical narrative text structures commonly used in academic settings. The global significance of such a discussion is reflected by a growing concern that academic success may be compromised by a misalignment between the narrative practices in a child's primary language(s) and the narrative practices in a respective language of teaching and learning (e.g. Makoe and McKinney 2009, Souto-Manning 2013).

The current study explores inference-making processes in 10–12-year-old bilingual Malawian children who either listened to stories in their primary language, or L1 (Chichewa), as compared to their secondary language (L2) (English), or viewed cartoon films containing no verbal content. The 127 children who participated in the study were divided into six groups characterised by different conditions of stimulus presentation – stimuli varied with respect to their modality (non-verbal film versus pre-recorded stories) or the language of stimulus presentation (English or Chichewa). The results indicate that the pre-recorded audio recordings seem to have supported inference-making more than the corresponding wordless films. This finding illustrates the significance of linguistically presented content. The linguistically presented content elicited even more inferences when it was presented in the children’s L1 (Chichewa) rather than in their medium of academic instruction (English). However, the results also indicate that the children from the private school (with English as a medium of instruction) drew more inferences than the children from the public school (where Chichewa is the medium of instruction). Furthermore, the results reveal that while the children were able to use knowledge transfer from a variety of knowledge bases to draw inferences, the inferencing process was impeded when the story content deviated too much from their own experiences. Lastly we found indications of variations in inferencing patterns that seemed to correlate to the language in which the stimulus material was presented and responded to.

This study aimed at analysing errors in essays written by Malawian students who were learning English as a Second Language (ESL). Its specific focus was three-fold: to analyse errors using Corder’s (1974) five-stage approach to Error Analysis, to assess sources of the errors and to identify measures that could be applied to help students attain proficiency in English. The study utilised qualitative and quantitative designs. The participants in this study were students and teachers. The former were required to write essays which were analysed using Corder’s (1974) five-stage approach to Error Analysis while the latter were interviewed to establish sources of errors and ways to overcome them. The study has revealed that the following were the most frequent errors: tense, spelling, subject-verb agreement, articles, nouns, capitalisation and fragment. The study has further revealed that inter- lingual and intra-lingual interferences were the main sources of errors. The study has further demonstrated that other factors such as a lapse in reading culture, carelessness and social media’s writing style influence students’ errors. This study has shown that Error Analysis is helpful to teachers because it enables them to identify specific and common problems. Teachers can, therefore, focus more attention on the identified problems. The findings have pedagogical implications for ESL teachers because they would employ appropriate pedagogy to minimise students’ errors in the area of grammar and sentence structures. The findings also have practical implications in the sense that some platforms could be organised in order to grill teachers on how to improve their content and pedagogical skills in ESL writing. Teachers could also use these platforms to share their experiences with fellow teachers and map the way forward to improve their instruction skills.

Drawing on the social inclusion theoretical model, this study examines critical needs of hearing impaired learners during an English reading comprehension lesson. Some of the challenges that hearing impaired learners experience arise due to their exclusion from activities, participation and access. The study utilised qualitative approaches through semi-structured interviews. A total of twenty-six participants from three secondary schools located in the northern region of Malawi participated in this study as follows: seven regular teachers, two specialist teachers, two resource persons and fifteen hearing impaired learners. The results reveal that most hearing impaired learners do not manage to attain all reading comprehension objectives. Although teachers use a combination of strategies during a reading comprehension lesson, they do not utilise strategies that promote higher-order cognitive thinking skills. Finally, the results reveal that hearing impaired learners encounter several challenges some of which may be avoided if teachers embrace inclusive practices. The results have implications for stakeholders, teachers and researchers as follows: there is a need to improve the inclusive system of education by providing in-service training for teachers and employing competent specialist teachers and resource persons to facilitate the learning of hearing impaired learners. There is also a need to improve the learning and teaching facilities for inclusive schools as teachers and learners bemoan lack of teaching and learning materials suitable for hearing impaired learners. Teachers would be able to overcome some of the barriers to participation and learning which arise due to inadequate teaching and learning resources. Further research