A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Award of the degree "Licencié en pédagogie Appliquée, Agrégé de l'enseignement secondaire en Anglais"

Résumé,

The study, which deals with factors affecting students, oral proficiency in English at the upper level of Science section in Burundi Secondary schools, sets out to identify the place of the speaking skill in the development of oral communicative abilities in spoken English at secondary school level in general and in the science section in particular. It also seeks to identify problems encountered by pupils of Sciences sections in Burundi Secondary schools during the process of teaching/learning English. The English programme taught in Science section is based on project Aftrmath textbook which aims at teaching technical English.

Four hypotheses guided the study : The project aftermath programme constitutes an obstacle to the development of the oral communicative competence of Second Science Form pupils, the speaking skill is not given a great attention and priority in the curriculum as well as in the Science section so as to develop oral ability which is the target for most learners, Second Science Form pupils have negative attitudes towards the acquisitiion of oral English communicative competence and teachers are not well motivated to teach and promote the speaking skill.

The study was conducted in five public secondary schools in Gitega province particulary in the Second Science Form. Both 5 teachers and 219 learners were cencerned by this study. A written questionnaire and classroom observation were used as research instruments to collect the data that were analysed and interpreted quantitatively. It was found out that activities likely to promate the speaking skill were almost not easy to handle because of insufficient didactic materials. In addition, the instrutional material project Aftermath did not help the pupils to develop the speaking skill and teachers feel that the latter is time-consuming. On top of that, tachers failed to improve their students' oral proficiency in English because oral skills are not tested in the National Exam.