ABSTRACT The study sought to examine how selected characters (Jojo Badu, Marjorie, Norah and Dwayne) in Benjamin Kwakye‘s The Other Crucifix (2010) use the clause as an interactive unit to establish and maintain interpersonal relations. The Mood system and its grammatical categories of Modality, Subject, Polarity, Tense and Vocatives of Halliday‘s Interpersonal Metafunction of Systemic Functional Grammar (SFL) were analyzed for interpersonalness. It also looked at what these categories of...
ABSTRACT The study sought to examine how messages are organised in Charismatic church programme posters in Ghana. Thus, it identifies and describes the number of semiotic modes present on the posters used by charismatic churches in Ghana and how these modes combine to create a grammar. The study examined twenty charismatic church programme posters in Ghana using the visual grammar approach to multimodality, which was developed by Gunther Kress and Van Leeuwen (2006) and Generic structure pote...
ABSTRACT This work is a corpus-based study of newspaper editorial language. It compares the usage of sentence types and clause patterns in newspaper editorials from native and nonnative English contexts. Using register theory (RT), and other theories which relate language to contexts of use and to communicative function, this work investigates the distribution of the two major grammatical structures across newspaper editorials from the two sociocultural contexts. The aim is to validate the ce...
ABSTRACT Quality education is the bedrock of national development and progress. In the course of the history of education in Ghana, there arose the need to improve accessibility. Hence, a series of interventions such as the Education For All (EFA), the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), and the abolition of school fees and levies which led to the introduction of the Capitation Grant scheme (CGS), were introduced. These initiatives triggered a s...
Abstract Research on reading has indicated that children who fail to achieve reading competence in their early grades experience reading comprehension difficulties later in the upper levels of education. Owing to such reasons, many senior high school (SHS) students in Ghana are not able to cope with high learning that demands reading, and they lack comprehension strategies aimed at helping them construct meaning from text. Reading fluency, with its components such as reading sub skills and co...
ABSTRACT This study examines the West African civil war novel by investigating how female novelists present the West African civil war narrative. It examines how the female perspective on the civil war ushers in new dimensions that may be missing in earlier male authored novels. The argument of this thesis is that female novelists writing about West African civil war embark on a social agenda in their novels. Their perspective (narration) is one that goes beyond the blood curdling details of ...
ABSTRACT In the lower primary classrooms in Ghana, most teachers are faced with the challenge of having to teach pupils from diverse ethnic and language groups. This qualitative study therefore investigates the practicalities of the instructional language policy and the role that English plays in multilingual classrooms at the lower primary schools. Accordingly, the research aims to find answers to the following questions. First, what medium of instruction does a teacher who does not understa...
This research set out to study the Verbal Group in the Student Pidgin (SP) of a female Senior High School in Ho. SP is the type of Pidgin English, variously described as “educated,” “institutionalised” or “student” pidgin, and is believed to have started in a few prestigious boys‟ secondary schools in the late 1950s and 60s in the southern part of Ghana. It [SP] has since spread fast among secondary school students and graduates in the country, and has taken a firm foothold...
There are many scholarly works on oral poetry in Africa and Ghana. Some scholars have also on performance poetry in Ghana and Africa as a whole. It is interesting to note however that not much has been done on contemporary spoken word poetry in Ghana. It is undeniable that contemporary spoken word poetry in Ghana is gaining popularity hence the need to study it in order fully understand its role and importance in society. It is observed however that most of the work on contemporary Ghana...
The phenomenon of human migration, as Marie McAuliffe and Marfin Ruhs (2017) agrees, “stretches back to the earliest periods of human history” (1). Human migration in the modern world has been massively enhanced by the ease of mobility due to the massive advancements in transport technology. People tend to migrate from one part of the globe to another where they hope to achieve better socio-economic life, or where they can be free from persecution and conscription. The compelling phe...
ABSTRACT The study investigates the performance of students in Colleges of Education in the English language.The researcher is an English language tutor at the SDA College of Education and has observed over a period that the students perform poorly in the English language examinations. The study is guided by four research questions. They are (1) Are trainee teachers’ performance in the English language affecting pupils’ performance at the basic school level? (2) What are the causes of tra...
ABSTRACT Several studies have been conducted in educational settings in Ghana and other parts of the world regarding the linguistic behaviour of teachers, and the implication of such behaviour on the learning outcome of the pupils they teach. In Ghana, where English is learned as a second language, most teachers are unaware of how and when to use code-switching as an L1 resource in their teaching. This situation negatively affects uniformity in instructional procedures. While the use of code ...
ABSTRACT Recognized as the founding father of modern African Literature in English, Achebe stands out as perhaps one of the most critiqued authors due to his portrayal of women in his early novels. In an attempt to respond to the disparaging representation of Africa in colonial novels such as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Achebe focused on portraying the power and charisma of the African male; the adverse effect of this being weak submissive women who succumbed to these powerful men. T...
ABSTRACT Essay writing is usually a frequently used mode of testing of language competence in schools in Ghana. Thus, when students write essays, it is mainly for academic purposes. Quite often, for purposes of testing, students are required to use, among other things, a variety of sentence types and this is attested to by the marking scheme of the WAEC English Language Examinations. Again, research evidence appears to suggest that ESL students studying at an advanced level of education use ...
ABSTRACT This study examined the way in which socio-cultural identities and ideological motivation permeate English language learning and the effect on language competence. The investigation looked at two diametrically distinct schools (i.e. a Grade A and a Grade C school) particularly in the area of the student's background and motivation, to ascertain the effect of this socio – cultural and motivational factors that impinge on the learning of grammar and vocabulary, which reflects in the...