Lexico-Syntactic Study of English Usage in Online News Responses and Their Implications for 21st-Century Pedagogy

Abstract

Online news reading is becoming a part of people’s daily lives, and this medium gives readers the opportunity to comment and share their opinions. It is noteworthy that the comments posted in response to online news articles encompass the entire Nigerian populace of over 250 ethnic groups and more than 400 languages for whom English is a second language. Therefore, this study examined the diverse ways in which Nigerians use English in their comments on online news articles and how these usages affect the teaching and learning of English in the 21st century. A study corpus of about 100 sentences was collected from Opera news responses over a period of three months. Analysis revealed that the use of English in online news responses differs from standard English usage due to users’ habits to code switch and mix, translate directly from their mother tongue to English, give different meanings to existing words, or coin words to represent things that are new to ease their communication. In the attempt, grammar, punctuation, and spelling were either badly used or omitted. This linguistic habit, when transferred by students to their academic work, influences how they are subsequently evaluated. Therefore, there is a critical need for teachers to identify and distinguish between the usages of English that are “incorrect,” “dialectical,” and those that conform to “Standard English” so that students do not mistakenly interchange them.