IMPACT OF ECLECTICISM ON NIGERIAN ESL LEARNERS’ COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

This study adopted three practical teaching strategies intended to positively affect learners’ writing skill while neutralising negative factors affecting their writing competence. To achieve the study objective which aimed at the assessment of the best teaching strategy to enhance learners’ writing proficiency, a comparative study of three teaching methods (namely communicative, eclectic and task-based methods) was used over a 6-week period as a treatment on three experimental groups A, B, C respectively and a control group (D) was taught using the conventional method. A pre-test was administered on two hundred (200) freshmen/subjects purposively selected from different Departments at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO). A post-test was used to ascertain the outcome of the six weeks period of treatment on their essay writing. Results varied according to groups but, most importantly, Group B showed very significant improvement and control group D showed no significant improvement at all in the post-test assessment while groups A and C’s writing ability improved just marginally at best post-test. Our findings suggest the need to pay attention to eclectic teaching techniques as a crucial element in enhancing writing proficiency among learners. The implications and limitations of this research in addition to guidelines for future research are discussed.  Article visualizations

Changes in pattern of Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate and C-Reactive Protein following major elective orthopaedic surgeries

Background and Objectives: Major surgeries are associated with various changes in the neuroendocrine and inflammatory cytokine system of the body. Most of these surgeries are performed with expensive implants and prostheses made of metals and their alloys. These metals are foreign bodies which when infected can lead to a disastrous outcome. Consequently, concerted effort is being made through the use of Erythrocyte Sedimentation Rate (ESR), C-reactive Proteins (CRP), and other acute phase proteins as a screening tool for early detection of deep surgical wound infections. The aim of this study was to determine the pattern of changes of ESR and CRP following major elective orthopaedic surgeries. Patients and Methods: This is a cross sectional study carried out over a period of six months. All patients that had major surgery within the period were noted and followed up. ESR and CRP levels were checked pre-operatively on day 0 and post-operatively on days 2, 4, 7 10, 14 and 42 using the modified Westergreen method and the High Sensitivity (HS) ELISA technique respectively. Results: The result showed a steep rise in both parameters (more than 300% constitutive levels) within 2 days post-operatively. The peak value for the mean serum CRP level was attained on day 4 post operatively with normalization to its pre-operative serum level on day 42 (P = 0.543), while the mean serum ESR reached its peak on day 7 and remained significantly higher than its pre-operative mean serum level even on day 42 post operatively (P = 0.003).Conclusion: ESR and CRP are both useful acute phase proteins for monitoring early post operative complications like surgical wound infections

Requests and Linguistic Politeness Strategies: A Case Study of Igbo English Speakers in Nigeria

This article examined the Igbo native speakers’ perception of request act as well as the linguistic politeness strategies used to achieve this communicative intention in their conversational English as bilinguals. The study participants were 2748 undergraduate Igbo native speakers purposively selected from different Federal and State Universities in the core Igbo-speaking states of South-east/South-south Nigeria. To elicit data, a 10-item discourse completion task (DCT) with guided options written in English and designed to evoke politeness strategies in request discourse projecting hypothetical situations was administered to the participants. The results showed that the study samples brought to fore their sociocultural expectations as Igbo by adopting principally the directness strategy in performing the request act. Also, findings revealed that the participants paid attention to certain sociolinguistic variables such as hierarchy, extent of familiarity, which contributed to the variance, observed in their choice of strategies in some contexts. Furthermore, the study noted a measure of linguistic transfer of a tinge of the native language to the target language (English language) as participants tried to fulfill the communicative goals of the request act in the target language. Notably, the findings demonstrated the possibility of communication breakdowns arising from grammatically correct but pragmatically inappropriate utterances from learners hence the need to further emphasize pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic consciousness - the dearth of which has been implicated in the study