A Survey Of The Syntactic Features Of Educated Nigerian English
International Journal of Academia, Volume 2 No.1
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60951/afrischolar-336Keywords:
English, Nigeria, Educated, Features, Syntactic, SurveyAbstract
This paper focuses attention on “A Survey of the Syntactic Features of Educated Nigerian English”. It discusses the syntactic issues and tries to account for possible deviations from British English usage. The purpose of this is to establish a relationship between Educated Nigerian English and British English usage. To achieve this purpose, Nigerians from four majority Nigerian ethnic groups selected by a stratified random sampling technique were studied. These respondents were required to write freely on a given essay topic which
ranged from narrative, descriptive, expository and argumentative. The essays were analysed on the bases of syntactic structures of the English language. The results show very slight variation of Educated Nigerian English at sentence, clause, group and word levels from the structures of the British English usage. However, acceptable constructions from informants were obtained at all the levels. The paper concludes that the difference between the syntactic structures of the Educated British English and Educated Nigerian English is not so much. This point to the fact that learner’s habit is inadequate for the learning coupled with inconsistency in managing students and teachers. From the findings, implications, recommendations are made for future researchers, learners, teachers and government for improved performance.
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