| Very often the relevant education authorities, employers, parents and teachers themselves frown and complain about the declining standard of the English language amongst our ESL learners and graduates. The situation is so alarming that among the major factors identified for very high unemployment rate of about 40,000 undergraduates is their weakness in the English language. Numerous measures have and are being taken to address this sad-state-of-affair among them sending teachers for further training stints to learn from the si fus in UK, the US and New Zealand and making suggestion that the English language be used for the teaching of critical subjects like engineering, mathematics, science and technology. Only very recently, there was a suggestion by our Prime Minister only to be welcome by many quarters including parents themselves to consider reintroducing the English school back into our education system. Despite the many alternatives allow me to suggest a way to help overcome the problem but from a pedagogical perspective. It is therefore, the aim of this paper to present the findings of a study on a more practical approach to teaching the language by means of using Ideational Frameworks a concept that works using the underlying principles of the communicative approach of "Language Learning Cycle" and the psycholinguistic notion of Language Awareness. This project adopted a quasi-experimental approach involving the obligatory occurrence analysis of essay writings of 26 secondary technical school students over a period of about six consecutive weeks. The findings of the project reveal that the effect of using IFs technique did enhance the language awareness of certain grammatical aspects of the target language in their series of essay writings both overall and between groups of PMR results. Thus, it is the conclusion of this study that IFs is very practical for classroom use and may serve as a powerful and effective tool both for teaching as well as learning. Hopefully, by putting the technique to constant and gradual use, not only will ESL teachers find it easy and interesting to teach the English Language to their respective L2 learners but also enable learners themselves to take charge of their own learning towards becoming an independent and an effective learner of the target language irrespective of whatever subject they learn be it Science, Engineering, Medicine, History and others. |
