Nigeria: Education:-Language: the Problem And Solution to Exams Malpractice

8 July 2004
analysis

The structural defects in language students bring into tertiary institutions constitute a basis for evaluating the extent of deterioration of the Nigerian learning system. What form of preparation would anyone expect from students who had never been taught by someone who could pass for an English Language teacher? Or what performance outcome could be expected from students whose method of learning had been imitation, copying, practice, and memorization, or students whose language of instruction is vernacular or pidgin English, residue of which infiltrate their verbal writing? Faced with competitive standard examination, malpractice cannot be ruled out since these students want to succeed by all means.

Such pidgin structural interferences especially in the use of the few, pidgin, easy to pronounce prepositions: for, with, on, up, in most situations may be excusable in colloquialism, but not in standard educated spoken form. In written form, this is unacceptable except by those who believe in the wrong notion that one writes as one speaks.

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