This article looks at the influence of Bemba music on politics in Zambia. It covers close to four decades of Bemba music in Zambian politics from pre-and post-independence in 1964 up to 2008. Starting with the Bemba dirge, the article shows how Zambian music in popular (or pop) culture has crisscrossed with music in politics. In order to sharpen the focus of the article, a background to the history of the Bemba people, the Bemba language, and how it has influenced the musical culture of Zambia's Copperbelt is provided. Through Bemba music, the world learns what keeps Zambians together and also that no single language group in Zambia can exist to the exclusion of the others.

Little is known about persuasive effects of figures of speech in the English of advertisements in Ghanaian press. In the current study, we focused on this persuasive effect of figures of speech in the English employed in advertisements in newspapers in Ghana. Since advertising is a genre of mass media communication which unearths the exceptional qualities of products and services in a persuasive fashion, it is also a form of marketing communication through which business organizations inform the general public about new or improved commercial endeavors. Therefore, language plays an indispensable role in the transmission of the message. The language of advertising influences the reasoning, thinking, feeling and the general attitude of the audience. The study reported about in this article was underpinned by the Conventional Figurative Language Theory, utilizing the qualitative content analysis approach as the analytical framework. The findings revealed that copywriters of the Ghanaian newspapers employed English figures of speech (tropes and rhetorical figures) in advertisements for persuasive effect.

This study investigated the EFL reading goals of Grade 11 students across public and non-public schools in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. To this end, quantitative data were collected from 556 (375 public and 181 non-public) students via pre-tested structured questionnaire and analyzed into means, medians, standard deviations, ranges and Mann-Whitney U test scores. The results show that non-public school students were found better than public school students in possessing components of both extrinsic and intrinsic goals for reading. The notable exception in this regard is that public school students had higher social motivation for reading than their non-public school counterparts. Based on this finding, it has been concluded that non-public school students have a better chance of evolving as persistent self-initiated EFL readers since they have various goals which urge them to engage in reading a range of texts. It is thus recommended that English language teachers in public schools should constantly take actions to enable their students to develop appropriate EFL reading goals.

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This research explored the viability of an English Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) curriculum in higher education institutions of teaching, learning and research in Commonwealth Africa. An exploratory qualitative research design based on the review of literature as well as a relevant theoretical framework were deployed to highlight the viability of an English language CLIL curriculum that can foster transformative education amongst the youth in the higher education teaching, learning and research settings of African Commonwealth countries. The review established that English language CLIL curricula are suitable for Commonwealth Africa’s multilingual higher education learning contexts as the starting point of any English language CLIL programme was lacking in the Commonwealth African context. Based on the reviewed literature, the viability of the English language CLIL curriculum for Commonwealth Africa was established. Furthermore, significant implications for the viability of English language CLIL curricula for a transformative and empowering youth education in the whole of Commonwealth Africa are provided. Important recommendations and conclusions are made for further longitudinal empirical research as more data on English language CLIL curricula become available in Commonwealth Africa.