The paper examines how English students in an English department construct their identities in relation to their discipline and its opportunities for job entries and career development in comparison with the study of other disciplines. Using a combination of questionnaires and interviews, it solicited responses from students in an English department which it analyzed and concludes that students identify themselves closely with English because of its perceived qualities of enabling them to think critically and creatively thereby making them able to communicate effectively; it consequently serves as a foundational course opening up all job and career avenues to them. In short, it develops their consciousness and starts them at advantage in career development in comparison with students of other disciplines.
For most rural dwellers, breast cancer is a death sentence. While the concern and discourses of health practitioners and professionals, researchers and analysts may focus on medical attention and the creation of awareness, defined as a deliverance from ‘ignorance’, the personal experience of victims of breast cancer and the members of the community in which they are embedded have a different take. Their focus is more on the origins of the illness and its management in waiting for the ultimate inevitable fate. The paper uses the approach of personal experience and Guttenplan’s categories of consciousness/experiencing, attitude/attitudinizing, and act/action/activity to undertake a somewhat longitudinal examination to investigate the anatomy of the decision-making processes involved in such incidents - socio-cultural and socio-economic -involving personal and family perspectives, facts/experiencing, beliefs, critical decision-making processes and conclusions attendant with the course of management of the disease through a case study. It concludes that the outlook as currently enacted on what creates and causes delayed medical attention may need to be more critically reviewed. It recommends that the acceptance of seeking medical attention for perceived ‘death sentence’ diseases such as breast cancer should first tackle the certainty of ‘cure’ and the solidarity with victims to ‘fight’ and ‘defeat’ the disease rather than on awareness creation based on unexamined and unsupported assumptions of ‘ignorance’ of victims and their communities that make the efforts to tackle the breast cancer menace in Africa not as effective as they could be.
The ability to communicate is a skill needed for beneficial learning outcomes. It is likewise needed for functioning in our connected world and spaces. However, undergraduate writing still gives the impression of poor English writing skills and inadequate communication. The paper takes a linguistic ethnography approach to examine the effects of poor English writing skills on the learning objectives and communication of undergraduate students. Using a random sampling of 37 examination scripts of Communication Studies students and their analysis through a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives, the study suggests that poor English writing skills and the inability to communicate are likely among the effects of the inability of undergraduate students to acquire competence at the comprehension, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation tasks needed to enable them compose knowledge and meaningful messages as well as to communicate them. The study, therefore, suggests the need for investigating practical steps that can be taken to assist students with poor English writing competencies and skills to access knowledge and be able to produce knowledge in their learning situations, and further still, be able to communicate their knowledge as competently as possible without an overemphasis on grammatical correctness as the goal.
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