This article examined the Igbo native speakers’ perception of request act as well as the linguistic politeness strategies used to achieve this communicative intention in their conversational English as bilinguals. The study participants were 2748 undergraduate Igbo native speakers purposively selected from different Federal and State Universities in the core Igbo-speaking states of South-east/South-south Nigeria. To elicit data, a 10-item discourse completion task (DCT) with guided options written in English and designed to evoke politeness strategies in request discourse projecting hypothetical situations was administered to the participants. The results showed that the study samples brought to fore their sociocultural expectations as Igbo by adopting principally the directness strategy in performing the request act. Also, findings revealed that the participants paid attention to certain sociolinguistic variables such as hierarchy, extent of familiarity, which contributed to the variance, observed in their choice of strategies in some contexts. Furthermore, the study noted a measure of linguistic transfer of a tinge of the native language to the target language (English language) as participants tried to fulfill the communicative goals of the request act in the target language. Notably, the findings demonstrated the possibility of communication breakdowns arising from grammatically correct but pragmatically inappropriate utterances from learners hence the need to further emphasize pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic consciousness - the dearth of which has been implicated in the study.

Insecurity is currently a recurrent issue in many countries of the world - developed and developing. In Nigeria, it has multifaceted manifestations such as Boko Haram terror attacks, banditry/kidnapping, herdsmen/farmers clashes, religious tensions, secessionist movements, agitations for resource control, piracy, organized crime, etc. Recently, the level of insecurity in Imo State has become alarming with several reported regular occurrences of shooting in the area involving unknown gunmen, bandits, and security operatives - a situation which is undoubtedly affecting both social life and the local economy. This paper, therefore, sought to investigate to what extent the socio-economic living standard of the people of Orlu Imo State, Nigeria has been adversely affected by the insecurity situation currently ravaging the area. The investigation mainly covered 2018 and 2022. The survey research design used questionnaires and interviews as instruments of primary data collection were used for the study. Frustration-Aggression Theory served as the theoretical framework. Data were analyzed with simple percentages while the chi-square was used to test the hypothesis. Secondary data from library research was utilized for analytical discussion. Research findings showed that insecurity adversely affected the socio-economic living standard of people as the situation forced residents to be indoors and businesses and social activities ground to a halt. It is recommended that dialogue and round table discussion be made to urgently find a lasting solution to the insecurity situation because the residents are bearing the brunt of the suffering.

This study adopted three practical teaching strategies intended to positively affect learners’ writing skill while neutralising negative factors affecting their writing competence. To achieve the study objective which aimed at the assessment of the best teaching strategy to enhance learners’ writing proficiency, a comparative study of three teaching methods (namely communicative, eclectic and task-based methods) was used over a 6-week period as a treatment on three experimental groups A, B, C respectively and a control group (D) was taught using the conventional method. A pre-test was administered on two hundred (200) freshmen/subjects purposively selected from different Departments at the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO). A post-test was used to ascertain the outcome of the six weeks period of treatment on their essay writing. Results varied according to groups but, most importantly, Group B showed very significant improvement and control group D showed no significant improvement at all in the post-test assessment while groups A and C’s writing ability improved just marginally at best post-test. Our findings suggest the need to pay attention to eclectic teaching techniques as a crucial element in enhancing writing proficiency among learners. The implications and limitations of this research in addition to guidelines for future research are discussed.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0022/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>