The Communicative Implications Of Nigerian English Usage

1.7 Methodology

Data for this research would be gathered through participant discussions with various categories of Nigerian users of English. The researcher, incidentally, is an ESL teacher with over ten years of cognate experience. As a teacher of English the researcher would, within and outside classroom interactions note some peculiar features of Nigerian English usage from students’ writings and utterances of colleagues. In addition, the researcher would elicit vital information/data from interaction with various professional groups such as medical doctors, lawyers, engineers, politicians, police, university undergraduates etc. With keen interest he would note the non-standard Nigerian expressions common among these categories of users. This, he would do without revealing his intents and purposes to his subjects. Much more data would also be gathered through critical examination of numerous literature, well researched articles published in reputable journals and books by expert linguists and ESL teachers would be studied. By and large, the researcher would adopt a normative research approach which, according to Nwabueze (6), “is based entirely on the impressionistic observations of the investigator”.

1.8 Analysis of Findings

Data collected through the above method would be sorted and categorized according to the inherent features of Nigerian English variant.