Striking balance and maintaining harmony between work and family have always been a great challenge for women in general. This article examines factors that conflict between official responsibilities and family demand among female staff of higher institution of learning in Nigeria. A structured questionnaire is administered to female staff of higher institutions across the country. Hierarchical sampling technique is used to select female staff from each institution. Simple percentage and bar charts are used to present the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents. The mean responses for each factor are ranked and the first four ranked factors are discussed. Stress, mental fatigue, and psychological burnout/disorder are the major effects observed, while resuming and closing work at convenience is the major mechanism being used by women in tertiary institutions. Other highly ranked mechanisms are using a housekeeper/help, using a childcare center closer to workplace, and using help from colleagues in carrying out official assignments.
Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational possibilities have received little attention in English language teaching (ELT). This study examined lexical bundles, a type of multi-word expressions, to understand their structure and co-occurrence possibilities with other syntactic elements. It was aided by an automated frequency-driven approach using two corpora, the British component of the British National Corpus – a first language (L1) corpus – and a purpose-built Nigerian Media Discourse corpus – a second language (L2) corpus. Two items of lexical analysis software were used to extract three-word lexical bundles with a minimum of 50 frequencies per corpus. The syntactic structures of the identified lexical bundles were determined, and their in-corpus usages were analysed for their colligational characteristics. Results showed that both corpora had instances of general and genre-specific lexical bundles (LBs) with varying frequencies. Five categories of lexical bundles with different structural patterns and peculiar colligational characteristics were identified in the study. Since lexical bundles are more frequently found in both L1–L2 texts, mastering how they are used will further enhance the teaching of English as a second language. The teaching of lexical bundles as a multi-word expression is therefore recommended in ELT as a way of enhancing learners’ proficiency and naturalness in English.
Nigeria is a West African country with English as second and official language. In this study, the proficiency levels of graduates of Nigeria's higher educational institutions in English were investigated against ever-rising speculations that such graduates were unemployable because they do not have good communication and other employability skills. Essays written by 150 graduate job applicants were used for the research. Error Analysis was used for the identification and categorisation of errors in each essay, using grammar, lexis, punctuation and content as major categories. The first group identified (67%) had Low Proficiency Level, with poor knowledge of English grammar and grammatical applications; low vocabulary and high deficiencies in lexical selections; poor skills of punctuation, capitalisation, spelling, paragraphing and lettering; and shallow knowledge of common issues. The second group (23%) had High Proficiency Level, having fewer errors of grammar, lexis, punctuation and content relevance, adequacy, cohesion and coherence. The third group (10%) had Very High Proficiency Level, with a better mastery, understanding and applications of grammatical, lexical, punctuation and associated composition principles. A poor performance carry-over pattern in English at secondary school level was observed. This calls for serious remedial intervention by Government and all stakeholders to improve graduate employability.
The responsibilities of a typical African woman in family upkeep are enormous, ranging from house chores, cooking to childcare and so on. Striking a balance and maintaining harmony between work and family have always been a great challenge for women in general. This paper examines factors that conflict between official responsibilities and family demand among female staff of higher institution of learning in Nigeria. Structured questionnaires were administered to selected female staff of higher institutions across the country. Hierarchical sampling technique was used to select female staff from a university, a polytechnic, and a college of education in six states of the country (one state per geopolitical zone in the country). Simple percentage and bar charts were used to present the socio-demographic characteristics of respondents. The mean responses for each factor were ranked and the first four ranked factors are discussed. All Cronbach's alpha coefficients exceed 0.800 thresholds, validating all factors considered. Long working hours, inadequate working facilities and inadequate pay are major factors that cause conflicts between work and family among the respondents. Stress, mental fatigue and psychological burnout/disorder are the major effects observed while resuming and closing work at convenience is the major mechanism being used by women in tertiary institutions. Other highly ranked mechanisms are: using house keeper/help, using childcare centre closer to workplace, and help from colleagues in carrying out official assignments.
One of the theories that seek to unravel how the human language functions is the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). SFG achieves its uniqueness by seeking to develop a theory about language as a social process and an analytical methodology for detailed and systematic description of language patterns (Eggins, 2004). Given its suitability for the analysis of any text, SFG was used in this study for the analysis of the poem "My Lord, Tell Me Where to Keep Your Bribe". Though SFG shows how three different strands of meanings (ideational, interpersonal and textual) are expressed in the structures of clauses, the focus of analysis was on the grammar of textual and interpersonal meanings, hence the thematic and Mood structure analyses of the poem. The thematisation patterns identified in the poem included the use of textual themes (for inter-clause cohesive purposes), interpersonal themes (for the assignment of Mood labels to clauses) and topical themes, which altogether enabled the poet bring into thematic prominence the major issues of worry to an average Nigerian who had always thought judges and the courts of law should be immune from corruption. The Mood structure analysis showed the poet's conscious choices of the indicative Mood, with alternating options of interrogative and declarative clause types. Overall, the SFG-based analysis showed how the poet made conscious paradigmatic choices and arranged them into linear (syntagmatic) structures to make the different meanings conveyed in the poem.
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