A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Award of the Degree" Licence en langue et littérature Anglaises

Résumé,

The present study evaluates lexical competence of students in Basic Schools at Lycée Notre Dame de Rohero. The main objective of this study is to evaluate the pupil's competence and determining the state of lexical competence in English language among pupils studied in public basic schools in Burundi. The study was conducted on the pupils of basic schools namely " Lycée Notre Dame de Rohero". The informants selected were from 7th, 8th, and 9th form of the Lycée. In order to establish causes for making wrong selection of new words for those pupils in terms of lexical competence, a contrastive analysis in this issue was undertaken. This is a source of difficulties encountered by pupils of English as a second language. Although pupils of Basic Schools are taught to know some terms used in English, here was a hypothesis that stated, they find lexical competence difficult to learn. The data were collected from the written test and questionnaires administered to the pupils of these three levels. However, the results showed that pupils found it difficult to know new words seen for the first time. The results also showed that lexical competence of the participants (7th, 8th and 9th) is poor. Only the 8th form achieved a score of about 50% while the other two classes, 7th, and 9th form scored lower than 50%. Therefore, pupils were recommended to take enough time to practice for new vocabularies doing by self-study and look for adequate material to use in learning. Unfortunately, the materials to learn vocabularies were not enough. Thus, the government was recommended to make available those materials. It is therefore hoped that this study will be found useful by all the learners of English language in Burundi.