ABSTRACT
In Kenya, English is the official language of instruction at university. Most students begin learning English in school and are expected to learn the skills of academic reading and writing in English during their school years. Kenyan students must learn an important distinction in Kenyan education between compositions and essays as they make the transition from school to university. This involves moving from brief narrative tasks to longer expository tasks, and from writing processes suitable for brief exam writing to processes suitable for longer essay writing, often researched. Commenting on the sociolinguistic situation in Kenya, Love describes the Kenyan as being in the middle situation between native speaker and English-as-a-foreign-language speaker. The idea of keeping a personal journal is also foreign to many Kenyan students, unlike their US counterparts, who tend to be more familiar with journaling. Only within the last four generations has writing been introduced to Kenyans, by the British colonial administrators.
