A PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF FLIGHT ANNOUNCERS’ PRONUNCIATION PATTERN AT THE MURTALA MUHAMMED AIRPORT, LAGOS

Hearing an announcement made over the loud speaker in any Nigerian airport leaves most hearers with the impression that the announcer has an excellent command of English. There are however some listeners, mostly travellers that claim that they barely hear or understand what is being announced. This is a serious challenge since air travel is a global phenomenon that requires the highest level of intelligibility. This study thus aims to investigate the pronunciation pattern in the language of flight announcers at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, in line with the Labov’s theory of Linguistic Variation. Data was elicited from ten flight announcers, through purposive sampling; using a questionnaire and reading test. Output of the reading test was recorded, phonetically transcribed and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result showed that exposure to native speakers, age of respondents and years of working experience, affects correct pronunciation. It also showed that most flight announcers approximate the English phonemes with what is obtainable in their mother tongue while some others exhibited cases of dialectically influenced personal speech handicap

AN ANALYSIS OF FLIGHT ANNOUNCERS’ LANGUAGE AT THE MURTALA MUHAMMED AIRPORT, LAGOS

Hearing an announcement made over the loud speaker in any Nigerian airport leaves most hearers with the impression that the announcer has an excellent command of English. There are however some listeners, mostly travellers that claim that they barely hear or understand what is being announced. This is a serious challenge since air travel is a global phenomenon that requires the highest level of intelligibility. This study thus aims to investigate the pronunciation pattern in the language of flight announcers at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, in line with the Labov‟s theory of Linguistic Variation. Data was elicited from ten flight announcers, through purposive sampling; using a questionnaire and reading test. Output of the reading test was recorded, phonetically transcribed and analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result showed that exposure to native speakers, age of respondents and years of working experience, affects correct pronunciation. It also showed that most flight announcers approximate the English phonemes with what is obtainable in their mother tongue while some others exhibited cases of dialectically influenced personal speech handica

AN ANALYSIS OF FLIGHT ANNOUNCERS’ LANGUAGE AT THE MURTALA MUHAMMED AIRPORT, LAGOS.

Flight announcers are pivotal in making sure that no traveller misses or boards the wrong flight when announcements are made in the airport; thus they must exhibit an excellent command of English in order to communicate effectively. Therefore, this research is motivated by the concern of how flight announcers in Nigerian airports pronounce their words during announcements. It is a phonological analysis on the language of flight announcers at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos. The main objective was to investigate their pronunciation patterns using three linguistic variables (/ǝ/, /ð/ and /Ө/) in line with the Labovian theory of linguistic variation. The research instruments employed were a questionnaire (used to elicit respondents’ demographics) and reading tests (comprising of word list, phrase list and sentence list). Output of the reading tests were recorded using a Remax RP1.8GB.OLED Digital Voice Recorder. Data was phonetically transcribed with the help of Phonetizer (online software that transcribes and pronounces) and the 17th edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. It was then analyzed using descriptive statistics involving simple frequency and percentage. The result showed that exposure to native speakers, age of respondents and years of working experience in flight announcing as sociolinguistic factors; affect correct pronunciation while educational qualification and ethnic origin do not. It was also discovered that the retention of the strong forms in words like is, the, to, a in contexts where they ought to have been deleted was the recurrent phonological pattern; as almost all respondents made that mistake while reading the sentence list. As regards the announcers’ general use of language, the study showed that most respondents approximated the English phonemes with what they have in their mother tongue. At the same time, some respondents inserted and deleted vowels and consonants in words while some others exhibited cases of dialectically influenced personal speech handicap. This means that a person’s pronunciation could be attributed to mother tongue interference, variational, environmental and physiological conditions. Thus, flight announcers do not speak the Received Pronunciation (RP) but use a variety of Nigerian English. This is not only unintelligible to non-Nigerians but Nigerians too, especially when the flight announcers try to imitate foreign accents. In the long run, this could cause miscommunication resulting in travellers missing their flights or boarding the wrong flight. Finally, recommendations were made regarding steps that linguists, government agencies and the flight announcers themselves could do to improve their pronunciation pattern

Play Your Way Into Production: Game-based Skills Development for the Screen Industries

Screen industry employers report they are unable to recruit graduates with the right skills for entry level roles in film and television (e.g. runners or production assistants), citing a lack of business awareness and various ‘soft skills’ as barriers to employment (Grugulis and Vincent 2009; Carey et al, 2017; Jones, Swords and Brereton, 2022). Traditionally such knowledge and skills are obtained through in-person work experience on set, but work experience is usually unpaid and therefore inaccessible to many students and graduates. However, research in the use of applied/serious games and extended reality technologies for training purposes has indicated that situational skills training can be facilitated using these approaches (Ebner and Holzinger 2007; Connolly et al, 2012). This paper presents an analysis of the design process behind a game-based learning intervention, developed to enable players to experience a day working on a film set and to allow educators to open up discussions about working practices and employability/progression within the screen industry. The simulation gives players the opportunity to take on a junior role in a film studio, respond to typical requests on set, interact with other crew members and observe proceedings. The study draws on interviews with educators and an ethnographic account of playing the game and using the complementary educational resources. We argue that a serious game can function as a meaningful intervention allowing potential new entrants to the screen industry to understand the tasks and duties of job roles in the industry. This approach also improves access to the development of skills and knowledge which are traditionally gained through (unpaid) work experience