ELT IN AFRICA: CHALLENGES FROM NIGERIAN PIDGIN ENGLISH

Abstract

While teaching English in Africa we came across a few challenges.
Popular use of pidgin and mother tongue accent by our students were
common phenomena. The ESL learners used a kind of English which
had cultural and semantic connotations. We also observed that the use
of pidgin gave them a lot of fluency in communication. To teach
Standard English vocabulary and its usage required special efforts on the
part of ESL teachers. As the number of ESL learners now runs in to
millions, Nigerian English is gaining ground, and some expressions from
pidgin are becoming acceptable even among the educated section of
Nigerian society. Like Indian variety of English, Nigerian English is being
recognized by scholars of repute as a competitor with of Standard English.
This paper aims at examining the scope and content of non-standard
words and phrases commonly used by Nigerian speakers. Interference
made by mother tongue is not in the scope of this paper. We have chosen
Nigeria as the area of our study because it is an African country with the
largest number of English learners (ESL) in which Mother Tongue (MT)
and Nigerian Pidgin (NP) make ESL instructor’s job difficult, as the
Nigerian English has given entry to several pidgin words, phrases, and
usages.