Teacher –Made Language Test Planning, Construction, Administration And Scoring In Secondary Schools In Ekiti State.

The much emphasis laid on Continuous Assessment (C.A) in the current system of education in Nigeria has made C.A. to be important in the evaluation of students’ performance and even certification. Teachers give one form of test or the other for the continuous assessment exercise. It is therefore important that teacher-made tests are not just means of gathering grades but evidence capturing device that should be carefully designed to ensure high level of validity and reliability. This study therefore investigated how language teachers in secondary schools in Ekiti State plan, construct administer and score their tests. The research design for the study was the descriptive design of the survey type. The population for the study comprised all language teachers that teach English language, Yoruba language, French language and Arabic language in all the secondary schools in Ekiti State. Eighty respondents out of the population were purposively selected as sample for the study. A self-designed questionnaire was the instrument used for the study. The instrument was validated to ensure its face and content validity; it was also subjected to test-re-test reliability which yielded a coefficient value of 0.76 at 0.05 level of significant. Data collected were subjected to descriptive statistics. The result showed that language teachers plan, construct, administer and score their tests well. It was recommended that language teachers should be encouraged to continue to plan, construct and administer their tests well

Pragmatic Functions of Questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun

Questioning is an instructional process that is not only central to verbal interaction in the classroom but also essential to negotiation of meaning in discourse. Existing studies dealing with functions of questions have only identified few functions which questions perform in discourse probably because the scholars who worked on them have not explored varied situations and contexts which necessitate asking questions whose functions are totally different from the ones already identified in the literature. Hence, the current research investigates the pragmatic functions of questions in Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. The major advantage of using this source of data is that, it, unlike previous studies which investigate data from premeditated sources, this source provides rich and varied naturally-occurring contexts for asking different questions which perform different functions. The study is driven by insight from the concept of pragmatic competence. On the whole, the research identified nine novel pragmatic functions of questions which have not been documented in the literature. These include questions to indicate annoyance, questions to foster interpersonal relationship, questions to persuade somebody to do something, questions for showing disapproval and so on. These findings implicate that in a bid to build on a learner’s competence in a particular language, such a learner should be introduced to the importance of contexts in determining the function which a particular question is meant to perform in any communicative encounter