AN ETHNOGRAPHIC INSIGHT INTO ETHIOPIAN ENGLISH EDUCATION

The paper believes in the hypothesis that learning is simply acquiring or understanding the linguistic components of a language at cognitive level, whereas mastering is the part of using them in a well structured way with perfection and ease. Given this dichotomy, there is a grave concern among the EFL learners that they have been learning English for several years but they are not able to master it. Viewing the nature of the issue, this study was carried out with three long-term ethnographic observations in three phases totaling 15 months. The first phase of this study was aimed at exploring the major linguistic and non-linguistic impediments in mastering English from causal perspective only; whereas, the second phase discussed the issue from both causal and remedial perspectives, especially of linguistic impediments. This paper, which is the third or the last phase of the study, adds up remedies for the non-linguistic impediments too. To answer seven research questions, the paper has employed three data gathering tools: participant observation, unstructured interview, and document analysis; whereas, analytic induction and percentile scale have been used to analyze the qualitative and quantitative data respectively. Under findings, twelve linguistic and twelve non-linguistic impediments were found as serious deterrents in mastering English. From remedial perspective, the paper has proposed empirical approaches to overcome both linguistic and non-linguistic impediments followed by apposite recommendations.