Situational Analysis of Implementation of Content Coverage Policies on the Teaching of Kiswahili Language in Public and Private Primary Schools in Bungoma County, Kenya

Kenya is a lower middle income economic country on the East coast of Africa with a population of over 47 million people with over 42 linguistically heterogeneous groups. Kiswahili is the Kenya?s national language whose use in communication dates back to the colonial period in early 1930s. The teaching of Kiswahili subject has in many instances had many challenges despite content coverage policies in Kenya. This paper seeks to find out how the coverage of content in Kiswahili syllabus in the public and private primary schools showed or failed to show consistency with government policy that the syllabus should be recommended by the Ministry of Education and covered within eight years of schooling. The study adopted a collective case study design to gain an in-depth understanding of the actual coverage of Kiswahili content vis a vis government policy on the same. Qualitative data collected through interviews and focus group discussions were organized into themes, pertinent to patterns of the study, from which the researchers examined the usefulness of information in response to the research questions while descriptive analyses were used to present quantitative data.