Research
A Contrastive Analysis of the Production of English and Yoruba Vowels by Yoruba-English Bilingual Students in University of Nigeria, Nsukka
This study examined the production of English vowels by Yoruba-English bilingual undergraduate students at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. The instrument used for data collection was the pronunciation of a prepared word list. Sixty (60) students who speak Yoruba as their first language were randomly selected from five departments. The bilingual status of the students made it possible to assemble a corpus which reveals their various levels of competency in English. The result of the findings indicate that Yoruba language vowels differ to a large extent from English language and due to this, there are certain variations and deviations in the realization of English vowels by Yoruba-English bilingual students. From the data gathered, analysis shows that we do not have an equal number of vowels in both languages and there are some vowels in Yoruba that are not present in the English language.
An Analysis of the Syntactic Features of Jenifa’s Diary English and Its Implications on the Standard English Usage of Nigerian Students
Jenifa’s Diary, a popular TV show which gained much attention, has no doubt influenced the language use of teeming fans across the country. English usage of the protagonist of the TV show -Jenifa is armed with horrendous grammar and poor expression and after watching the film show, viewers have been inspired to speak like Jenifa. It is for this reason that this study analyzed the syntactic features of English usage of Jenifa and its implications on the English usage of students. Seven selected series of Jenifa’s Diary was observed with the aim of identifying the features of Jenifa’s English usage, after which its implications on students’ use of English were elicited. The features of Jenifa’s English as revealed by findings include semantic misapplication, malapropism, deviant use of verbs, code-mixing, literary transfer and many more. Even though, the English usage of Jenifa is ungrammatical and unacceptable to the norms of Standard English, a large population of students is emulating such language use. Students are seen saying “how is you†in place of ‘how are you’, I is fine†in place of ‘I am fine’ “Yaun!†to mean “yes or yes?’ “my friendship/friended†to mean ‘my friend’ “lifia†in place of “leave here†and many more.
