Social Media and Crisis Between the State and Secondary School Teachers in Cameroon: A Discourse Analysis of Telegram Messages and the Government Responses

Abstract

This study explores teachers’ discourses on Telegram during the strike launched by the movement “Enough is enough” or “On a Trop Supporté” in its French version. Secondary school teachers have been subject to the state’s manipulations and procrastinations since 2000. Some of the government announcements bearing expressions such as “On the high instructions from the Head of State”, “we will gradually solve the problems of teachers”, “ teachers are the best paid civil servants in Cameroon” just to postpone what they would have done before. Since then, the state kept feeding them with promises that are hardly fulfilled. As a matter of fact, the state continued to give them empty promises about their salary and special status. The issue resulted in the strike which began on February 21st, 2022 and is still going on. This study aims at investigating the linguistic power of some expressions used by the government in order to keep teachers in their poor working conditions. In addition, it investigates the teachers’ reactions towards the government dishonesty. Fairclough (1992, 1993, and 1995) CDA model helped in the process of data analysis. Data for this study is made up of 150 Telegram messages collected from secondary school teachers nationwide. Analysis unveiled that the government’s messages leaned on the slovenliness of English language to dodge the teachers’ requests.

An Analysis of Deixis in Cameroon Social Media

“…The following constitutes some selected samples of time deixis: (7) I am preparing the exam which will start tomorrow and finish on Friday (WHAP 120-2021-male) (8) A-Ok, but very busy this week maybe next week (WHAP 140-2022-male) B-I wish to submit it by Thursday (WHAP 140-2022-male) (9) They will probably join us tonight (WHAP 154-2021-male) (10) Here is the topic for today (WHAP 169-2021-male) (11) Does a dwarf man drink alcohol now (FBK 116-2021-male) (12) … we will start tomorrow after that with PRS on Saturday (WHAP 123-2021-male) Levinson (1983) and Renkema (2004) definitions confirm the use of time deixis in the above examples. The different deixis in these illustrations include: 'tomorrow' and 'Friday' in example (7), 'this week' and 'next week' in (8) A, by Thursday in (8)B, 'tonight' in (9), 'today' in (10), 'now' in (11) and 'on Saturday' in (12).…”

“…Hence, EMEC has significantly impacted language through its users, metamorphosing to its innovations and usage via all the dimensions of language levels among which is deixis. It is revealed so far that the innovations in EMEC relate to English spelling (Tabe & Zaazra, 2021), Netspeak and neologisms (Agwetang & Florine, 2021), lexical expression (Zaazra, 2022). Levinson (1983, p.54) defines deixis as the structure in language with the aim to indicate person, place, time, social distinctions and roles in discourse (Levinson 1983, P. 54).…”

A Speech Act Analysis of Greetings in Cameroon Social Media

“…In attempting to express themselves, people do not only produce utterances containing grammatical structures and words, but also perform actions via those utterances (Austin, 1962). Some authors have given strong interest to linguistic features (Agwetang & Florine, 2021;Dąbrowska, 2018;Nouhou, 2022;Nouhou & Tabe, 2021;Tabe, 2018Tabe, , 2023 to demystify language use on Social Media (SM). This paper uses three social network platforms (Facebook, WhatsApp, Messenger).…”