Biafra secessionist agitations in Nigeria continue to generate varied conversations online and offline. This study applies critical discourse analysis and the appraisal framework in examining social actor representations in the ongoing Biafra agitations in Nigeria. It analyses posts produced by interlocutors, as they express variegated stances towards the agitations and its actors, within two vibrant Nigerian digital communities, Nairaland and Nigeria Village Square. This study identifies binary social actor positioning, revealing both negative valence and positive self-representation strategies towards the agitations and principal social actors in the agitations. Expressed within the appraisal resources of attitude, engagement and graduation, these valuations result in the distribution of socially and emotionally constructed identities for the principal social actors in the agitations. Such distribution is socio-cognitive, as there is the likelihood that the representations might evolve into the creation of new ideological orientations or the reinforcement of existing ideological leanings, whose consequences are potentially double-edged for tranquillity in the Nigerian polity.

The demand for literacy in a developing country like Nigeria has multiple results such as the expansion, by leaps and bounds, of the average Nigerian classroom. This paper highlights the reasons for large classes in Nigerian secondary schools, the educational and psychological dimensions of language testing in large classes, the challenges of such classes and how they affect achievement and in the long run, the standard of education. It also tasks the proficiency levels of English Language teachers especially in the area of testing and points out new paradigms in language testing, particularly in large classes from the two perspectives of human and infrastructural development, and teacher empowerment and initiatives. The study suggests methods of improving language testing in large classes through pragmatic techniques.

In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian government on 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement, embarked on different mass strike actions and demonstrations including online activism. The civil resistant actions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increase deployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the government and its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourse in Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourse analysis approaches in examining issues of identity and selfdetermination with little attention paid to visual-pragmatic strategies in representing people and their actions. This article, therefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of 'Occupy Nigeria Group' online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representing people and their actions in the event. Seventy-two online protest posts purposively sampled from the groups' page are used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elements and functions in the representations using insights from Mey's (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen's ( 2006) multimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal mode complements the visual in projecting the demands and resistance of the group. The posts which are classified under six semantic fields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation, exaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have various visual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling, humour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, including photo trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmatic acts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling and stipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian sociopolitical and linguistic context.

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To win the support of the electorates, Nigerian politicians engage diverse resources during electoral campaigns. Some of these resources include political jingles. This study examines political discursive practices and their socio-cognitive functions in the political jingles of the 2015 general elections in Nigeria. This is to illuminate the politicians’ sociopolitical evaluations of the electorates. The data for this study comprise 50 political jingles of the presidential campaigns of the two major political parties in the country, the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the main opposition party, the All Progressive Congress (APC). This study is anchored on linguistic and literary theoretical perspectives using Critical Discourse Analysis and Sociology of Literature, respectively, to reveal the inherent meanings in, and socio-cultural implications of, the discourse of the sampled political jingles. Data analysis identifies political jingles as face-saving, assertive and educative acts. It also notes that implicatures, names, lexemes, religious allusions, evidentiality and code-switching are ideologically employed in the political jingles to enhance the politicians’ personalities and acceptance among the electorates.