Students’ and Teachers’ perception towards WAPASA Application for e-Learning in Harare, Zimbabwe

This paper examined the perception of grade 1 pupils and their teachers towards WAPASA Application in the teaching and learning. The study employed the descriptive research design. A stratified random sampling of 210 pupils and a purposive sample of 12 teachers were from three purposively selected primary schools in Harare City. Of those, eight teachers and 196 pupils responded. Due to positive attitude of teachers and learner, it was concluded that WAPASA App is very useful for teaching and learning as it was perceived to be fun and interesting to use. Therefore, it can be used to support and enhance learning. If properly incorporated into the teaching and learning process, e-learning will play an important role for learning effectiveness. Therefore, it is recommended that, teachers should use the WAPASA App for maximized learning effectiveness. The Ministry of Education as well as directors of schools should provide in-service professional development workshops for teachers so that they may gain more knowledge on how to use the application

Ortographic and morphological problems in headword identification, selection and presentation in ALLEX

This article discusses aspects of an on-going lexical computing project at the University of Zimbabwe, known as ALLEX, the acronym for African Languages Lexical Project. ALLEX is a collaborative, multi-faceted, long-term, computer-aided lexicography project that is intended to produce a series of dictionaries, glossaries and other language reference works in the indigenous languages of Zimbabwe, starting with the first ever monolingual Shona dictionary, which is already at an advanced stage of preparation, and which will also be the first corpus-based dictionary in Zimbabwe.The article confines itself to problems relating to word formation processes in Shona, specifically with reference to the lexicographers' need to ensure consistency in (i) identifying word forms as headwords in the running texts of the corpus, (ii) selecting from among these headwords to decide which ones to enter in the dictionary, and (iii) presenting the entries in the standard orthography.First, an outline is given of the project's background, objectives, priorities, guidelines and work in progress. The article then focuses on specific problems encountered, and discusses these, and some of the solutions, in the light of advances in computer lexicography, with particular reference to concordancing. It will become evident that the problems encountered by the ALLEX Team have to do with the unlimited capacity of the Shona language's basic and derivational word formation processes, which it shares with the other languages in the Bantu family. Therefore, it will be suggested that these problems, and the solutions that are being worked out, have much wider implications that go beyond Shona and Zimbabwe.Keywords: african languages, headword identification, headword presentation, headword selection, lexical project, lexicography, morphological problems, orthographic problem

Report on the Retreat to Review the ALLEX PROJECT: Kadoma , 21-27 September 2003

Report was printed by the University of Zimbabwe Reprographic Unit, December 2003