Continued from last week. Read the first part here By Ahmed Umar, Ph.D. From secondary to tertiary levels of education, a student’s...
Continued
from last week. Read the first part here
By Ahmed Umar, Ph.D.
From secondary to tertiary levels of education,
a student’s competence in English and excellence in education were facilitated
and enhanced by the ‘number of textbooks and creative/fiction works’ he/she had
perused and absorbed. The physically slow and deliberate process of looking at
the book prints (word-for-word, sentence-by-sentence) ensured that the reader
eventually absorbed a lot in form and content. In turn, this process equipped
the learner with adequate competence to form appropriate English expressions.
The
almost sudden emergence and proliferation of ICT (gsm phones, computers,
internet) on the Nigerian intellectual horizon, ironically, triggered the
‘explosion of English’ on a negative side, instead of a positive one. The
‘faster’ INFORMATION COMMUNICATION ensured by this technology conflicted with
the ‘slow/gradual’ pace of natural learning of knowledge; encouraged learning
laziness by projecting a faster, physically and mentally less tasking but also
much less absorbed process.
In a
negative (for ‘education’) furtherance of this cognitive plague, the Nigerian
users of ICT, a majority of whom are the youth (many of whom are yet to be
competent in Standard English), consolidated this ‘fast food’ addiction of the
ICT by introducing new diminutive/mutilated/wrong forms of ‘English lexicon’ in
the name of internet chat abbreviations/textese.
Gradually, the users came to ‘recognize and
accept’ such forms as the appropriate forms, and lost the little they had known
of nationally and internationally acceptable forms of English. Ultimately,
their confused cognitive mix-up of a positive purpose (INFORMATION
COMMUNICATION – preferred ‘fast’) with another of different plane (INFORMATION
ABSORBING – gradually/slowly ensured) formed their current ‘intellectual
limbo’. These excessive and erroneous perception and use of the ICT, against
the traditional ‘reading culture’, inevitably landed this present crop of
learners of English in-between two oscillating cognitive points, without
progress: ‘fast information
communication’ to ‘slow/no information absorbing’ and back!
The easy and fast connectivity of internet
social media platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.) engendered a rapid
consolidation of this cognition of English between learners in both southern
and northern regions of Nigeria, with the northern part being at a greater
disadvantage due to the weaker pedagogic regional factors explained above. Of
course, native-English-speaking youth who use similar ‘adulterated’ types of
English to chat on the internet could conserve their ‘Standard English’ via
their nativity, locality and continuous use of English in their countries,
thereby being ‘safe’ from such ‘ICT English’ cognitive mix-ups that hit
Nigeria!
Eventually, those champions of ‘ICT English’ must have decoded the
‘malformation’ of their English forms and responded to that semiotic ensemble
by dismissing English in its entirety through frustrated expressions like:
“English’s not my mother tongue!”; “Na English I go chop?”; “Russia/Japan/etc
attained technological advancement through their languages, not English!”;
“Competence in English is not intelligence!”.
The absurdity and futility in such responses
are reflected in the fact that: (i) Most of those ‘advanced’ non-English
countries did not have the colonial/historical imposition of foreign language
as Nigeria had, and those that did, had the advantage of one ‘native national
language’ to replace the colonial language, unlike Nigeria’s 500 or so; (ii)
Most of those ‘ICT English/mother tongue’ champions have not been competent in
the formal and creative aspects of even their claimed ‘mother tongues’,
especially in the written forms of those ‘tongues’!
Take
Hausa, Kanuri and Babur-Bura, for instance. Any observant linguist of these
languages, from BUK to UDUS to Unimaid, can tell that many of those ‘ICT
champions’ of mother tongue, especially native speakers of these three
mentioned languages, horribly violate the formal rules of writing in these
languages. Examples of such violations abound on social media, in adverts and
in illustrations of Kannywood movies (very strong socio-semiotic resource in
‘Hausa writing’ to its viewers, especially the youth), and in their everyday
‘formal’ and ‘informal’ writings in these ‘mother tongues’.
Prominent
categories of such violations rest on simple spelling (omission/misuse of
letters), morphology (separation of connected morphemes, connection of separate
morphemes, etc.), weak vocabulary and lexical choice (unnecessary,
non-code-switched insertions of English words in ‘mother tongue’ expressions,
non-emphatic/non-stylistic repetition of words or expressions, etc.). Consider
the following examples in Hausa, being one of the major ‘mother tongues’ in
Nigeria:
SPELLING:
“Ka xo anjima” [“Come later”] (instead
of “Ka zo anjima”); “Ne ma ina su” [“I too want
it”] (instead of “Ni ma ina so”).
MORPHOLOGY:
“Malamin su ne” [“It is
their teacher”] (instead of “Malaminsu
ne”); “Kuzo muje” [“Come, let’s go”] (instead
of “Ku zo mu je”).
VOCABULARY:
“Zan yi calling dinka anjima”
[“I shall call you later”] (instead of “Zan
kira ka anjima”); “Bal dinsa ne” [“It is his ball”]
(instead of “kwallonsa ne/Tamolarsa
ce”).
REPETITION:
“Ainihin wato...ainihin
wato...ka gane...ka gane, na tsane shi” [“Actually...actually...you
see...you see, I hate him”] (instead of “Ka
gane, na tsane shi”). NOTE: A
number of presenters even on state/national/international Hausa radio
programmes are equally infected with this part of the syndrome!
Such misuses of the claimed ‘mother tongue’ by
ICT champions of “English’s not mine” slogan have grown into so large a corpus
that some of our language students at the university, and even some of the
academics, have set off a new trend of researching on it. Once again, let this
challenge be thrown against those champions of mother tongue to camouflage
their shame and acute sense of incompetence in the nationally instituted medium
called English: How many of them have adequately grasped the writing rules of
their mother tongues? How well can they express themselves in those tongues?
The disgraceful revelations to these questions recur daily in thousands across
the internet, in various other engagements and industries.
To many other nations, developed and
developing, native English speaking and otherwise, the set and undisputed
positive benefit of the ICT as a ‘fast/easy’ information communication technology
has been optimally tapped, has not been confused or misused as a ‘fast/easy’
information TEACHING technology.
For such
ICT users in Nigeria, a considerable number of whom are among the youth,
however, the emergence and proliferation of ICT in the country has ‘killed’
that ‘reading culture’ (a culture that has made the present, older intellectual
elites great academics of the ivory tower, the think tank on various national
issues, the business tycoons) and condemned them to a limbo of neither learning
any language (English or ‘mother tongue’) nor freeing themselves from this
‘dizzying oscillation’ of the ICT, perceiving an Information Communication Technology[ICT] in the place of their Technologically Challenged
Intelligence/Intellect [TCI].
A greater peril posed by this plague to
competence in language and development in education in Nigeria is the subtle
but significant increase in the size/population of these ‘TCIntellectuals’ and
their spread into critical national sectors like the academia, the political
elite, and institutional administrations. Government, even if it means
dissecting infected parts of its anatomy, should move towards arresting this
national intellectual plague before it consumes the entire system.
At present, whether we like it or not, English
remains our ONLY medium of ‘national’ and ‘international’ communication for
various engagements. Continual denials of this fact, especially by the ‘lazy’
among the ‘youth’, and perpetual clinging to a ‘dizzying’ perception of ICT
oscillation would only ultimately ostracize Nigeria as an ‘intellectual desert’
in global academia, where real academics perfectly perceive the expression “I
See Tea” in the spinning of a “Tea Cup Inverted”.
It is a horrifying fact that, in every 24-hour
period, a typical TCI in Nigeria could spend most of his wakeful hours
‘viewing’ catchy messages, pictures, videos, etc, flicking across his/her
internet monitor, without absorbing the information contained by all that
he/she has ‘viewed’ into his/her long-termed memory. So pervasive is this
plague that one hears many reports of some ‘teachers’ Googling what they are
going to teach from the internet right there in the class to teach, when to
teach it!
The same case applies to many students who
attend examination halls with phones to furtively use them in searching for
answers from the internet. That is why most serious invigilations have made it
a standing rule to bar students from going into such halls with phones. The
ultimate, albeit painful, joke of the ICT age in Nigerian education is that,
before its arrival, there were fewer books to read but deeper/wider knowledge
was gained; after its arrival, there were millions of books to ‘view’ but
little/no knowledge is gained. Ponder on this poser.
The
author can be contacted via ahmed.umar@fud.edu.ng
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