Language, Education and Manpower Development in the Present-Day Nigeria

Students of secondary and tertiary institutions are, by the nature of their education and training, potential socio-economic manpower and political force for personal/individual development as well as national manpower development. In Nigeria, as in all nations of the world, this tends to be the primary goal of establishing secondary and tertiary institutions such as grammar and high schools, the polytechnic, colleges of education and universities. The knowledge and skills acquired in these institutions are therefore expected to translate into concrete personal and national advancement socially, economically and politically. Language naturally provides a ready means for communicating skills and expertise that are impacted on these students and in which they too express their competence, skills and expertise in pursuit of personal and national goals. Thus there is the need for competence in the use of the language of education as well as in language of general communication. By the accident of history, Nigeria, a multilingual country, has become officially bilingual. This fact has precipitated a precarious linguistic situation for most present-day students of tertiary institutions in Nigeria. Close observations have shown that many of them are neither competent in English, which is their official language, nor in their indigenous languages. Research has shown however that competence in both or either the official language or indigenous languages is not only desirable but is also required for individual’s personal advancement as well as national development. Based on personal observations, surveys and observations of others such as my students and colleagues at the University of Lagos and other universities, polytechnics and colleges of education as well as grammar and high schools, I present, in this paper, my own perspective about the state of language, education and manpower development in the present-day Nigeria. Keywords: language, competence, education, manpower developmen

Multimodal Discourse Analysis of 2012 Governorship Election Campaign Billboards in Ondo State, Nigeria

Billboards are widely used in the world for political purposes. The Ondo State 2012 governorship candidates employed billboards for their campaigns. It is observed that an average viewer of the campaign billboards finds it difficult to attain the exact interpretation of the semiotic devices in the pictures as intended by the producers. The objectives of this paper are: the analyses of the political discourse of the multimodal texts in the billboards and the exploration of the nature of the multimodal texts. This paper adopted the text dimension, the discursive practice dimension and the social practice dimensions of Fairclough’s (1992, 1995) three-dimensional framework. This theoretical framework was used to analyse and discuss the selected campaign billboards. The data collected for this study consisted of three governorship campaign billboards which were purposively selected. The study discovers that colours are meaning signifiers in the selected billboards and that the pictures, colours and verbal anchorages together with the various interpretations given them show the polysemic nature of signs. This paper concludes that visual resources are essential tools employed by campaign billboards’ producers. Finally, the study recommends that producers of campaign billboards should ensure simplicity and relevance of the semiotic resources used in the visuals. Keywords: Governorship elections, Campaign billboards, Multimodality, Verbal anchorages, Colours DOI: 10.7176/NMMC/95-04 Publication date: January 31st 202

Genderlect as discourse in Yoruba movies

This paper offers an analysis of gender discourse of Yoruba male and female movie characters. The Yoruba speech community is one of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria. Their genderlect is examined and investigated in terms of their use of minimal responses, intensifiers, hedges, tag questions, polite and taboo words. The techniques of Media Monitoring and purposive sampling were employed to obtain relevant data. Randomly, four Yoruba movies were selected from which forty eight scenes were analyzed. From each movie twelve scenes, comprising single gender interaction and mixed gender interactions were considered. Social constructivism theory combined with the relevant aspects of Discourse Analysis was employed for the data analysis. In addition, a Chi-square analysis was done. The findings show significant differences between the gender groups in the use of hedges, intensifiers, minimal responses, taboos and euphemistic or polite words. The findings also corroborate the constructionist assumptions regarding gender-bound language taking context into consideration. Thus we conclude that the differences in the usage of male and female movie characters are determined, as empirically evidenced, by several sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic and discourse features within the context of situation or interaction in the Yoruba milieu.Joseph Babasola Osoba: [email protected] Grace Oluwamusanmi: [email protected] Babasola Osoba is an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ikwo, Abakaliki, Ebonyi State, Nigeria. His research interests include socio-linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, psycho-linguistics, critical linguistics as well as phonetics and phonology.Sola Grace Oluwamusanmi is a research student in the Department of English, University of Lagos, Akoka, Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria. 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