*English Language Teaching: a Continuing Venture*
Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose
English, like most other languages, are living. This living perspective to the language has to be factored into its pedagogy at every stage of teaching. The livingness of the language manifests at every level of its linguistic description. At the lexical level, some words take up new meanings (such as nice and rheumatism which respectively meant being foolish and a pain in the head before this time) and some others become informal or old fashioned (as in the case of parlour which is now preferably dropped for sitting room). Negators were used after lexical verbs in Shakesperean age giving permissible structures such as: Say not what you don’t know. Modern English, on the contrary, favours negators as pre-modifying elements in verb phrases. These changes happen over time rather suddenly.
This short article chronicles pedagogical stagnation and stereotypes in the English language teaching in Nigeria. Many teachers, especially at the secondary school level, do not exhibit dexterity, both at the level of content and methodology. It is essential to understand that the teaching of subjects cannot be made uniform at all levels. The definitions of a noun as “the name of any person, animal, place or thing”, a verb as “an action word or a doing word”, a phrase as “a group of words that does not contain a finite verb and does not express a complete meaning” cannot be made sacrosanct as they may not be comprehensive enough at some levels of grammatical discussion. Defining a verb as an action word or a doing word will, for instance, make a student in the senior class erroneously identify “happy” as the verb in “I am happy” or claim that the sentence does not have a verb. A verb necessarily therefore has to be any word which expresses an action, a state or a process and not just an action word. This must be clearly demonstrated to the students at stages above the primary school. One would also wonder what verb the adverb “generally” is qualifying in the sentence: “Generally, Nigerians are hardworking.” This puts a curious student who has not been taught the possibility of an adverb modifying other word classes including a sentence in some state of confusion.
It is in the first place a problem that definitions have to be foregrounded in language teaching to the extent that they become stereotypic. It is not uncommon to find students defining word classes without being able to identify such words within sentences. A student conveniently defines a phrase with the parameter of not having a finite verb without even knowing what makes a verb finite or non-finite.
It is the therefore the objective of this article to make the following recommendations:
1. The English language should be taught as a living subject with great attention to its synchronic and diachronic development.
2. Teachers should know that as a living phenomenon, the language has to be dished out to students based on their level of Intellectual sagacity, paying attention to the fact that certain concepts may have to be narrowly or broadly taught depending on the class of students involved.
3. It is essential also for language teachers to play down on the definition of terms and rather concentrate on usages and identifications of different grammatical units within structures.
The English language has consolidated its stay as the language of relevance in Nigeria and the attainment of competence in it is largely tied to an effective teaching.
(c) 2019 Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose
Doctoral Candidate of English, University of Ibadan.
