Volume 24, Issue 1 (September 2024)

This study investigated the effectiveness of intensive reading instruction in improving vocabulary acquisition and English language use among secondary school students in Osun State, Nigeria. The study adopted a quasi-experimental pre-test–post-test control group design involving 180 Senior Secondary School students selected from four public secondary schools in Ilesa West Local Government Area. Ninety students were assigned to the experimental group, while ninety students formed the control group. The experimental group received intensive reading instruction for twelve weeks, while the control group received conventional vocabulary teaching. Data were collected using Vocabulary Achievement Tests (VAT), Classroom Observation Schedules, Students’ Attitude Questionnaire on Vocabulary Learning (SAQVL), and semi-structured teacher interviews. Reliability coefficients of 0.82 and 0.79 were obtained for the VAT and SAQVL respectively using Cronbach’s alpha. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, paired sample t-tests, independent sample t-tests, and thematic analysis. Findings revealed that students exposed to intensive reading instruction performed significantly better than those taught through conventional methods. The study also found that intensive reading improved students’ pronunciation, contextual understanding, sentence construction, reading confidence, and overall language use. The study concludes that intensive reading is an effective pedagogical strategy for enhancing vocabulary acquisition and improving students’ communicative competence in English. The study recommends that English language teachers regularly incorporate intensive reading activities into classroom practice and that schools provide adequate reading materials and vocabulary-development resources.

This study employs a postcolonial ecocritical framework, drawing upon Rob Nixon’s concept of "slow violence," Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s theorization of island ecologies, and Edouard Glissant’s poetics of relation. Through close textual analysis, comparative literary criticism and the creation and adoption of postcolonial Caribbean Ecologies literary analysis framework, the article investigates how contemporary Anglophone Caribbean writers articulate environmental degradation, resource extraction, and climatic vulnerability alongside colonial historical trajectories. The primary text corpus comprises Diana McCaulay’s novel Dog-Heart (2010), Sharon Millar’s title story from The Whale House and Other Stories (2015), and Monique Roffey’s novel The Mermaid of Black Conch (2020). The analysis demonstrates that contemporary Caribbean fiction disrupts Eurocentric, apocalyptic climate narratives by framing ecological crises as continuous with plantation legacies and extractive imperialism. McCaulay exposes urban environmental injustice and socio-ecological toxicity in Kingston’s informal settlements; Millar critiques coastal extractivism and marine commodification through bodily and ecological trauma; and Roffey deploys indigenous mythology to foreground human-nonhuman relationality and resist neo-colonial ecocide. Together, these texts re-conceptualize Caribbean environments not as passive backdrops to catastrophe, but as active sites of postcolonial ecological resistance and relational survival.

This paper interrogates the manner in which African fiction portrays homosexuality and other non-normative sexual orientations, with a focus on Akwaeke Emezi’s “Who is like God?” and The Death of Vivek. Earlier works tend to depict these themes negatively or censoriously, while later ones appear to celebrate these deviations, emphasizing characters’ sexual experiences. A third group of writers simply depict the struggles of homosexual characters without moral judgment or celebration. Using the phenomenological approach and aspects of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, this paper argues that Emezi belongs to the second group of writers who seem to celebrate these culturally stigmatized sexual deviations in their stories. Emezi’s works’ frequent depiction of taboo relationships: spiritualizing the crossing of cultural boundaries; use of sexual preferences as justification and, celebrating “freedom” beyond moral and family constraints, suggest a systematic effort to normalize sexual taboos considered culturally unacceptable in the African socio-cultural context. The paper concludes by reiterating that Emezi’s fiction’s condemnation of the censorial view of non-heterogenous sexuality is based on the very premise which they criticize - the use of taboo to uphold preferred social realities. It also reveals that the central characters like Kachi, Vivek and Osita who engage in non-heterogenous relationships are driven by the Thanatos instinct. Lastly, the paper advocates for literary portrayals that uphold and sustain generational values that have helped African societies develop distinctive identities.

This study critically explores the intersection of political satire and poetic resistance in Tanure Ojaide’s Democratic Warlords and The Fate of Vultures. Through a close reading of both poems, the paper interrogates how Ojaide uses satire as a stylistic and ideological weapon to critique the failures of postcolonial African leadership, particularly in the Nigerian democratic landscape. The analysis draws on postcolonial theory and sociopolitical criticism to demonstrate how Ojaide exposes the paradoxes of democracy hijacked by self-serving elites, metaphorically cast as warlords and vultures. Accordingly, the study employs the qualitative approach for textual analysis, in order to foreground the postcolonial theory and sociopolitical criticism that the study is anchored on. The paper thus, argues that Ojaide’s use of animal imagery, irony, and allusion constitutes a subversive poetics of dissent aimed at mobilizing public consciousness and reclaiming democratic ideals. The findings reveal that by exposing political leaders as scavengers feeding on the nation’s carcass, Ojaide advances the proposition that positions the poet as a moral conscience and cultural watchdog. Ultimately, the study contributes to African literary discourse by highlighting poetry as an effective site for political engagement and resistance.

Titles often provide condensed representations of the thematic and ideological concerns of literary works. In postcolonial fiction, ordinary words, objects, colours and structures can acquire metaphorical meanings that illuminate colonial legacies, cultural conflict, social hierarchy and struggles over identity. This study examines the titles of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness and Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building as conceptual metaphors of coloniality. The study adopts George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory as its principal analytical framework, while Quijano’s concept of coloniality of power and Mignolo’s decolonial perspective provide supporting conceptual context. Using qualitative close textual analysis, the study examines the metaphorical structures of the selected titles and relates them to the colonial, social, cultural and ideological concerns represented in the novels. The study concludes that the titles function not merely as identifiers but as conceptual metaphors that provide interpretive entry points into the novels’ representations of coloniality, identity and social relations.

This paper reads Flora Nwapa’s Never Again (1975) and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982) as accounts of how the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) damaged land, water, and women’s bodies as a single process, a connection that studies of the war’s ecological toll and studies of its gendered violence have so far treated separately. Extending “ecobordering,” a term developed for petrofiction and resource extraction, to state warfare, and reading it alongside a non-essentialist ecofeminism, the paper offers close readings of the novels’ language to show how military campaigns, scorched-earth tactics, and blockades devastate local ecosystems while tightening patriarchal control over women’s bodies and movement, and how hunger itself becomes a means of sexual coercion. It argues that both novels present women as agents, not only victims: their mobility, labor, and dissent challenge masculine militarism from within, even as hunger, class, and the state’s recruitment of women limit that agency. The paper contributes by showing that ecobordering, developed to describe environmental exploitation in peacetime, also names how war turns a national boundary into a single field of ecological and bodily violence, and by showing, through Nwapa and Emecheta, how women’s survival labor becomes the ground for postwar repair.

African literature has consistently served as a medium for interrogating social, political, economic and moral challenges confronting society. It is not merely a means for entertainment, but an instrument for exposing societal contradictions, injustices and crises that undermine human existence. This analysis examines how Wale Okediran’s Strange Encounters and Emmanuel Ojukwu’s Sunset for Mr. Goodman represent African and global crises. Through textual analysis, the paper explores themes such as corruption, moral decadence, abuse of human rights, injustice, ethnic discrimination, political oppression, war and institutional failure as reflected in the selected texts. The study adopts Marxist Literary Theory as its theoretical framework, given its focus on class relations, power structures, exploitation, and social inequality. Although both novels represent institutional failure, abuse of power and the vulnerability of ordinary people, they differ in the dominant forms through which crisis is experienced. Strange Encounters foregrounds corruption and moral decadence within post-independence Nigerian institutions, while Sunset for Mr. Goodman foregrounds war, ethnic discrimination, political oppression and broader human-rights violations. It is in this light, that the paper argues that literature functions as a social force capable of provoking critical consciousness and inspiring societal transformation. It concludes that African literature remains relevant in addressing contemporary global crises, by serving as a voice of resistance, advocacy for justice, accountability and social criticism.

This study interrogates postcolonial alienation and the search for self in Tanure Ojaide’sThe Activist and Helon Habila Oil on Water. The study employs Femi Osofisan’spost-Negritude variant of postcolonialism to show how alienation is represented through marginalization of individuals and communities in the Niger Delta. In The Activist, Ojaide presents a landscape of ecological devastation and social injustice where characters are estranged from their land, history, and sense of belonging. Similarly, Habila’s Oil on Water depicts the human and environmental cost of oil exploration, showing how oil related violence and exploration produce emotional dislocation and moral uncertainty. In both texts, alienation is not only social but also psychological, as characters search for identity in a world shaped by exploitation and broken promises. The paper contends that the search for self in these novels is closely linked to resistance, and recovery of human dignity. While characters experience loss and displacement, their struggles also reveal a desire for agency, ethical renewal and communal restoration. The study concludes that Ojaide and Habila use their works illustrate that selfhood can be reimagined through resistance, solidarity and environmental justice.

This study examines the use of humour as a persuasive strategy in selected Nigerian public health awareness posters. It specifically investigates how verbal and visual resources combine to construct humour as a persuasive strategy. The data for the study comprise sixteen purposively selected posters from the Nigerian Center for Disease Control (NCDC) official telegram handle, Rivers State University Teaching Hospital (RSUTH), University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH), and Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH). These were grouped into six sub-headings and six posters were finally selected and subjected to qualitative analysis with insights from Schopenhauer’s (1844) incongruity theory of humour and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) grammar of visual design. The study reveals that humour is predominantly subtle and is realized through visual incongruity, metaphorical representation, exaggeration, and playful comparisons. These humorous resources attract attention, simplify health information, and support message retention. However, humour is not employed uniformly. It is varied according to the sensitivity of the health issue. The study concludes that humour, when integrated with effective multimodal design, constitutes an effective multimodal persuasive strategy in Nigerian health communication.

The line between free speech and hate speech has become contested in Nigerian public discourse, particularly following the National Commission for the Prohibition of Hate Speeches (Establishment, etc.) Bill 2019. This study applies Austin's (1962) and Searle's (1969) speech act theory to selected utterances drawn from a broadcast by Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), delivered on 8 November 2019, alongside related public statements on the hate speech debate. Using a qualitative descriptive design, the study analyses twelve purposively selected utterances at three levels: the locutionary act, the illocutionary act, and the perlocutionary effect. Findings reveal that utterances popularly labelled "hate speech" frequently perform illocutionary acts of warning, accusing, and informing rather than incitement in the strict legal sense, while perlocutionary effects vary with the hearer's political alignment. The study argues that the classification of an utterance as hate speech in Nigeria is shaped less by illocutionary force than by the socio-political status of the speaker, and recommends that legislative definitions of hate speech engage more directly with established frameworks in pragmatics.