Please give this introduction in a summary form from the following:When the problem that is addressed in this thesis first began to occupy my mind, it was nothing more than a personal concern. Soon, however, it turned into an issue that had wider ramifications for my own professional life, and, subsequently, for the social and political arrangements that provide the context for our life and work prompted my mind to into this research. My own work in Mashonaland East as Headmaster and Education Officer at Seke District Office within the Ministry of Education and Culture was concerned with the assessment of learners and the evaluation of teaching. My workaday life was spent in an ongoing engagement with how learners learn, how teachers teach, and how successful they are in their learning, and how that learning can best be evaluated. In an emerging, developing country such as Zimbabwe, it is natural that our concerns with how learners learn are also genuinely related to broader national development goals. In my school as headmaster and in my work as Education Officer in the Ministry of Education and Culture, we fuss when we see that learners are struggling; we discuss and suggest alternatives to facilitate our measurement [and their learning that precedes it]; we take every precaution to ensure that our measurements are fair, yet of sufficient high standard and finally give staff development courses to teachers on the handling of lessons wherever there are problems. We are especially concerned about the standards: if standards are perceived to be dropping, it would undermine our development and existence at that particular school and ministry, not nurture it. If, for the sake of eliminating the injustices of the past, we lower our standards merely to ensure equity and access to education to those who were disadvantaged before, that will never be good enough, for it would reinforce stereotypes, especially racial stereotypes. It is in this context-the development of an assessment system that would be fair, equitable and of a high standard- that the problems that learners have with language, and specifically with the language of learning, first began to impinge upon my mind and this is all about it. This study has been prompted by lack of in-depth study commissioned by the government to look into reasons why pupils continue to fail regardless of how much input has been put into education in terms of infrastructure monetary resources put into the purchase of learning materials and improvement in teacher education. The researcher acknowledges that his experience in the teaching field as a teacher in the Primary School, Secondary School and Special Needs Education for 35 years [i.e. 14 years in primary school, 10 years in special needs education, 8 years in secondary education, and 1 year as Education Officer] has heightened his sensitivity to the experiences of pupils who fail in school and would like to formally investigate the reasons behind their poor results. . The study has also been prompted by a mini survey commissioned by the Schools Psychological Services, a department in the Ministry of Education, on the reading competence of the University of Zimbabwe First Year students whose reading levels were found to be mediocre even though they had high results in other subjects. In summary I was prompted in this research by the following reasons:This study has been prompted by the lack of an in-depth study commissioned by the government to look into reasons why pupils continue to fail regardless of how much input has been put into education in terms of infrastructure, monetary resources put into the purchase of learning materials and improvement in teacher education. This suggests that there is a problem of incompetence to be investigated. In my work as a remedial tutor with the specialist services department of the Ministry of Education namely: the Schools Psychological Services during my routine work with students with specific learning difficulties in order to fulfill the special education policy, during diagnostic teaching and testing sessions, I found that there was mispronunciation of words, that is, they were either wrongly pronounced or accented incorrectly. There was frequent confusion of similar consonants or vowels for example: b-d, v-f, g-k, mouth for month. This should be [5000 words]