Open Letter To WAEC And GES

I wish to draw your attention to a concerning issue with the English grammar question for the S.S.C.E. examination. The question, "What is the grammatical name of the underlined word as used in the sentence?" is flawed because it attempts to simultaneously inquire about both the grammatical name and the part of speech of the word.

While it is true that a word's grammatical name refers to its usage outside of a sentence, in this context, the question is asking about the word's function within the sentence, which is its part of speech. For example, in the sentence "Beautiful is an English word that comes from the French 'Beau'", the grammatical name is adjective, while the part of speech is noun, as "beautiful" functions as the subject of the sentence.

This inconsistency in the question format has been a recurring issue for many years. Fortunately, there exists a book titled "Advance Grammar For English Students" that addresses these very concerns. The book clarifies the difference between a word's grammatical name and its part of speech, and provides examples demonstrating these distinctions.

For instance, in the sentence "The boy has slept", the sentence itself is in the past tense, not the boy. The book also emphasizes the distinction between tenses and aspects, explaining that "I have slept" is in the present tense perfective aspect, not the past tense. By introducing "Advance Grammar For English Students", the Ghana Education Service and the West Africa Examinations Council are encouraged to consider this resource as a valuable tool for both examiners and students, as it has been approved by the GaCCA and represents a comprehensive solution to these grammar-related discrepancies.