Gabriel Dike
On Wednesday, August 21, 2019, academic and administrative activities were literally grounded at the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Lagos (UNILAG) not due to strike by lecturers or protests by students but it was to honour one of their own, who delivered his inaugural lecture.
Yes, that was the day Professor of English (Language and Linguistics), Prof. Adeyemi Daramola, paid his academic debt and was discharged and acquitted by the Vice-Chancellor Prof. Oluwatoyin Ogundipe.
Also, activities at the Senate Building was halted for some hours, again because of the inaugural lecture attended by the VC, other principal officers and top management staff, all ‘abandoned’ their jobs and headed to the J.F. Ade Ajayi Auditorium to listen to Prof. Daramola speak on some of his works, research and contributions to English Language in Nigeria.
Worldwide, it is a norm or a rule in the university that every professor must pay his academic debt by delivering an inaugural lecture in his field of study.
If one is a professor in the Nigeria University System (NUS) and has not delivered an inaugural lecture in his field of study, such a professor is said to owe the university and the community (academic debt) which must be paid.
The inaugural lecture titled: “The English in Nigeria as Discourses of Life and Death,” also attracted former students of Prof Daramola, family members, colleagues from other institutions and a host of guests.
On page 77, Prof. Daramola made reference to payment of an academic debt by professors, stating “if inaugural lectures have been established for professors to provide a succinct presentation of what they profess as academicians, I have herein provided a little of what I have been teaching and lecturing in the classrooms and researching into.
“I have been engaging learners to understand the theories and concepts of the English language simply and critically. Most importantly, I have enabled them, and still, do, to apply what they learn, firstly, to themselves, secondly to others in their immediate and distant environment.
“Other than that, but very much so, is the fact that I teach them to see the Creator of Heaven and Earth the way that I often do. After all, man and woman and child are created by the word- a linguistics verbalisation of life.”
Prof. Daramola disclosed that English is the language of education, most of the World’s religions, politics, aviation, mass communication, science, and technology. He observed that many Nigerians easily regard English, though erroneously, as a universal language.
He stressed: ‘’It takes a lot of effort to convince Nigerians that though the English language is the most widely spoken and written language in the World, it cannot be described as ‘universal’ but as, obviously, the most widely used language in the World.’’
The UNILAG don gave reasons for the poor performance of candidates that sat for the West African Examination Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), which include, the perennial shortage of qualified and experienced university graduate teachers of the subject and absence of a sociolinguistic rather than psychological theory of language.
‘’I have no doubt in my mind that the most problematic issue in Nigeria is the understanding of formal and informal expressions in English.’’
Daramola appealed to fellows and members of the Nigerian Academy of Letter (NAL) to partner with government and philanthropic individuals to build a National English Language Village (NELV) or a National English Language Centre (NELC) like the French Village in Badagry, Lagos or the Mathematics Centre in Abuja.
He said the establishment of village or centre will enable experts or scholars and practitioners of the language to be effective and to arrest the drift of the effective use of English.
The professor of English opined that rather than the current use of psychological theory to teach English, he suggested a sociological theory such as the systemic functional theory or speech acts theory and pragmatics.
Speaking with The Education Report, Daramola corrected the insinuation that the standard of education had fallen and argued that what happened is that standard has been lowered due to poor remuneration of teachers, large classrooms for pupils and students, ill-trained teachers in all levels and low budget allocation to the education sector as well as lack of facilities.
He described the talk about improving education by government officials as a mirage and urged the use of functional Linguistics approach to address issues in the sector and further stressed that there is no way that functional education will solve the problem of the country.
Shedding more light on the failure rate in English Language, Daramola explained that the introduction of mobile phones has not only affected the performance of students in WASSCE but also undergraduates.
The university don backed some schools that restrict or bar their students from the use of mobile phones, stating that the device distracts them from their studies.
‘’Even our students in the universities don’t study hard. They don’t buy books. Some of them hardly know about journals. In Literature, books have to be read. In my final year at UNILAG, Prof. Ebun Clark examined 12 Shakespeare texts in three months. Indeed, she finished one in one hour.
‘’In the department, not more than five Shakespeare texts are studied. Over 95 percent of our students will not be able to read one of Shakespeare’s texts. They download about two or three pages of commentaries on the books. How would they perform well?’’
Daramola stressed that pupils and students encounter problems in the English language because their teachers and parents assumed they know English and many of the kids attend nursery and primary schools, where teachers are not qualified to teach the language.
Said he: ‘’Yet these kids will score high marks in the test, assignments, and examinations so that their parents will continue to pay high school fees. When they come to the university, lecturers will mark them down due to their inability to follow rules of grammar.’’
Prof Daramola acknowledged several scholars who contributed to his success and also former and current vice-chancellors of UNILAG. He particularly commended Prof Ogundipe for giving him the opportunity to share his works and research on Language and Linguistics.
He concluded by stating, ‘’this is my academic story, my own world of learning, teaching, and research at this university.’’