A thesis submitted in the partial fulfilment of the degree of "Licencié en Pédagogie Appliquée, Agrégé d' enseignement secondaire en Anglais"

RESUME,

It has been that,learners of English in Burundi secondary schools have already an important linguistic background.Teachers of English therefore face a classroom situation with learners who have more than one language in their repertoire.In addition,there appears to be a different experience of language learning among these multilingual learners.The complexity of these students cannot be taken for granted.They range from those who are fluent in their mother tongue-Kirundi or Swahili -to those who are fluent in French,and to those who understand but really struggle to communicate in the said languages.It is a bit intriguing that learners who have already learned one foreign language to a high standard employ deliberate strategies to learn an additional language .This raises the question of whether the same could be said of students of the senior secondary school.
Therefore,the present work was mainly intended to find out the extent to which learning English in a multilingual context may be positively affect by previously learned languages.The study was carried out over 135 pupils and 45 teachers of Kirundi,French and English from 15 schools in Bujumbura city.The data were collected by use of written questionnaires,group interview and focus group.Within the analysis stage,the researcher came out with reliable findings.Learning English in a lot of teachers thought that it might be a handicap.Afterwards some useful recommendations were formulated in the place of different partners of education on different levels.