Classroom Discussion as a Development Tool: Useful English Language Teaching Techniques to Encourage Sustainable Citizenship in Nigerian Secondary School Students (Published)
Citizens who are capable of engaging in civic discourse, resolving conflict, and negotiating meaning are essential for sustainable development. However, the classroom is often disregarded as a primary location for the development of communicative competence in Nigeria’s development communication models. This paper applies pragmatics and discourse analysis to classroom interaction in Nigerian secondary schools to situate English language teaching within the broader discourse of national development. The study investigates teacher-student interactions in six public secondary institutions in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, utilising Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis. During the 2024/2025 academic session, 18 hours of transcribed classroom discourse, teacher interviews, and student writing samples were collected. The analysis indicates that teachers primarily employ directive and representative speech acts, while commissive and expressive acts that demonstrate civic responsibility, empathy, and deliberation are uncommon. Mitigation strategies, turn-taking negotiation, and contextual inference exercises are also infrequently employed in classroom discourse. As a result, students are able to memorise language forms but do not possess the inferential and civility skills necessary for participatory development activities, such as community meetings, advocacy, or conflict mediation. This paper suggests a pragmatics-based instructional framework that includes Speech Act Repertoire Building, Development Scenario Simulation, Discourse-Based Feedback, and Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. It posits that the English classroom can be repositioned as a development communication laboratory, thereby advancing SDG 4 and SDG 16.
Keywords: Nigeria, Pragmatics, SDG 16, SDG 4, Speech Acts., and English language teaching, classroom discourse
Pragmatics in the Classroom (Published)
Structured and systematic study of pragmatics in linguistics has assumed a central dimension since the middle of the century to meet the new vistas opened up for investigation in the field. Pragmatics as language in use views its study from the context-based perspective by real people in real situations, whether spoken or written within a political, social, cultural or religious melieu. But poor pragmatic knowledge, as often observed in ESL learners in discursive events has been unequivocally been devastating as, for example, when such errors are seen as insult on the participant, not grammatical resulting from the learning process. This paper aims at lucidly elucidating the need for pragmatic instructions in the classroom. It also examines pragmatics in actual language use by exemplifying with scalar implicature and the cooperative principles whose firm knowledge all over the world has enhanced communicative events as reality.
Keywords: Conversation, Cooperative Principles, Pragmatics, scalar implicature