Covenant Journal of Language Studies

WORD STRESS PATTERNS OF YORUBA-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN

2023-12-05T21:02:31+00:00

Stress is one of the prosodic features of English, in addition to intonation and rhythm. Many English learners have great difficulty with these prosodic features. The need to urgently address this challenge motivated this study and many others. This study examined the stress patterns of Yoruba-English bilingual children in English disyllabic words. One hundred Nigerian children from two south-western states in Nigeria served as the study participants. The data for the study comprise six disyllabic nouns (mother, baby, daughter, textbooks, person and village), three disyllabic verbs (believed, become, provide), and one disyllabic adverb (enough). The findings reveal that both word initial and word final stress patterns were used in pronouncing English disyllabic words by Yoruba-English bilingual children in Ogun and Oyo states. Village, mother, baby, daughter and person were stressed on the initial syllable, while enough, provide, textbooks, believed and become were stressed on the final syllable. Except for textbooks,the stress patterns of the participants were similar to the Standard British English (SBE) patterns presented in the 18^thedition of Daniel Jones’ Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. However, some of the Yoruba-English bilingual children from the public schools experienced difficulty in pronouncing some of the tested disyllabic words.

Ambiguity in English Quantifiers in Second Language Learning Context

2023-12-06T16:33:56+00:00

Language is a system of symbols, signs and vocal acts, randomly created but conventionally used in communication. Over time, English language in Nigeria, which is a multilingual country, has been characterized by certain features. One of them is the ability of English L2 learners/users to structure the language to meet their communication needs. Owing to ambiguity in some aspects of the language, many L2 learners/users of English have been faced with diverse challenges of correct usage. These difficulties are reflected in the language of secondary schools students which was examined to assess their understanding and correct usage of English quantifiers in an L2 learning context. Using Krashen’s Second Language Acquisition/Learning theory, this study sets out to investigate ambiguity in quantifiers among L2 users of English. It also aims to highlight areas of difficulty for L2 users of English in order to draw the attention of teachers of the subject to these challenges.

Identity, History and Caribbean Experience in Select Poems of Derek Walcott

2023-12-09T20:43:19+00:00

This study examines how history has shaped social identity and the impacts of both on Caribbean experience in Derek Walcott’s poetry. Using New Historicism as theoretical framework, it critiques some Caribbean historical realities highlighted in the selected poems and their impacts on society at individual and societal levels with particular emphasis on identity. Four poems from different collections of Walcott are analyzed in this paper, which are “Codicil”, “The River”, “Love after Love” and “The Sea is History”. The conclusions of this critical engagement show clearly that identity in Caribbean reality is inescapably tied to the traumatic history of displacement, enslavement, migration and alienation of the Caribbean peoples.