Children of Primary school age are very good at learning languages and learn all too well what their teachers give them. Unfortunately, at this period many primary teachers had a very rudimentary knowledge of English themselves (which is a reflection of their circumstances, not of their personal qualities). But the students had no means of knowing that this was the case. Telling them directly to ignore or at least question everything they had learned in primary school was of course counter-productive because it made them feel disloyal to their first teachers. It was our experience that whereas classroom teaching directed at correcting "primaryisms" had, before the introduction of the English Block techniques, been ineffective - many of the inaccuracies survived in the students' usage - students using the new techniques tended to drop them in favour of standard English usage without explicit teaching. This was the main evidence that the techniques were an effective means of promoting learning. (It points to the possibility of comparative research if such a teaching method were to be repeated.) The reason for this convergence towards standard English is presumably that they were relaxed enough and were receiving a large variety of impacts while at the same time were largely unconscious that the changes were occurring because their attention was focussed on the meaning and the tasks.

Two types of experience caused the complaints, which were always confined to a minority, to die away. One was the fact that students could read their personal file of written work and notice the development in such things as increasing vocabulary and more confident use of sentence structures; the other was when some of them took the State Form Two examination - the Kenya Junior Certificate of Education - and found that the test of writing included a letter. They also found that there was a summarising exercise which their note-taking in the course of doing the Research activities had prepared them for. (This examination had been devised not for state secondary school students but for the students leaving the voluntary Harambee secondary schools which had sprung up in the villages and provided teaching for Form One and Form Two with almost no resources in teachers or books). Those Kakamega students who took this examination (because they feared they might not be able to carry on to forms three and four out of difficulty in finding the fees) believed that their own teachers must have compiled the exam, because they said that everything in the English Block course had prepared them for it. This was the point when students accepted that they were learning and that, though unusual, the course was not harmful to them, as some of them had at first feared. Luckily the examination was a sensible test of competence and did not have a large component of "grammar" (which could only have been prepared for by doing exercises of a similar type - a circular activity which would have wasted time).

This illustrates the fact that to learn in this way requires a mental change of attitude. This may be harder for older students. At Kololo students in examination classes also were introduced to the Block method but found it hard going and resisted more. Although university level students need many of the skills and habits which were encouraged by the English Block - reading for research, working without a teacher giving orders, revising written work, writing from experience - it may be much more difficult for them to adopt them after many years of the conventional school than to acquire them when younger. That is, the problems university level students have are not entirely those of language, and the non-linguistic ones, perhaps need more thorough teaching than a short Studies Skills course can provide.