‘GOOD TEACHER, BAD TEACHER : INVESTIGATING GOSSIP IN A WOMEN’S COLLEGE IN KUWAIT (Published)
This paper investigated how and why female students at the English Department (TED) of the College of Basic Education in Kuwait frequently engage in evaluative discourse about their professors. The study also revealed key aspects on how evaluative information about professors is circulated and processed by students through different mediums, like social media, an online student forum, graffito on classroom tabletops, and so on. Utilizing sociolinguistic quantitative analysis, we gauged the frequency of using evaluative adjectives and how it affected the strength or validity of students’ judgments over professors and their teaching performances. Our findings indicated that there was a strong emphasis by students on course grades rather than knowledge or the learning experience resulting from attending college. In order to graduate with high grades students exert substantial efforts into choosing their preferred professor for a certain course. These efforts manifest themselves through gathering background information about professors to establish who according to them is a ‘bad teacher’ and who is a ‘good teacher’
Keywords: Evaluative Talk, Gossip, Professors, Students, Women’s College
A Chemistry Class with Kitchen Resources and Students’ Entrepreneurial Ability (Published)
This paper examined entrepreneurial ability of chemistry students when taught saponification reaction with and without kitchen resources. Saponification reaction was taught using kitchen resources such as, ashes of unripe plantain, ashes of cocoa peels, ashes of husks of oil palm husks, palm oil, vegetable oil, coconut oil and kernel oil were used for the experiments. The sample comprised of 200 students drawn from four secondary schools in Calabar Education Zone of Cross River State. Two schools were used for experimental (using kitchen resources) and two for control (without kitchen resources). Cronbach was used to establish reliability of the instrument which was 0.81.The research used a mix design (quasi experimental and survey design) and 10 items questionnaire as instrument for the research. Data obtained were analysed using independent t-test .The results gave a significant t-value of 4.85. There was a significant difference in the entrepreneurial ability of chemistry students taught saponification reaction with and without kitchen resources. Teachers are encouraged to use kitchen resources in the teaching of chemistry to make students small entrepreneurs.
Keywords: Entrepreneurial ability, Kitchen resources, Students, Teachers