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(I) We, previously, were siblings from the same mother Whereas we were from different fathers, we cared for each other We formed the Warsaw Pact and defended our other siblings together We loved and cherished one another Then, you level accusations against me that are groundless The basis you provide for annexing one of my children is truthless The people you claim you’re fighting for are now homeless Therefore, your combat against me and my people is needless What will you gain after axing my men? Why are you chasing guiltless children and women? Why are you disturbing the peace of my old men and women? Where is my destiny without my young men? Cease the combat, for our lives are frozen Cutoff the contempt, for love is golden II Broken Trust I gave you your freedom when our mother died in our sight I shared all the property we inherited equally without any fight I paid you money for gas passage without any plight In that regard, I expected you to defend our pride But, you broke our trust Brother, your decision to go to bed with them is disgust Baffling relative, you forgot that my ammunitions are robust Blood-warm fellow, in your eyes I perceive mistrust Tell me: Why do you want to bond with our adversaries? Tell me: What is the motive behind your mysteries? Take your time and assess the agony we suffered from their miseries Terminate your alliance with those mercenaries Stop this treachery, for our nemeses are mendacious Stop putting your broken trust in them, for their position is precarious

Conflict, a general phenomenon, exists in everyday life. It has different intrapersonal aspects (thus conflict within a person). There is also a kind of conflict that exists between two people or two groups of people. This is interpersonal conflict. It can be between a person and technology or between ideas. Conflict has been defined as a disagreement or clash between people, ideas, or cultures. Therefore, culture becomes a unique and sentimental phenomenon that is not only cherished but also protected dearly by individuals as well. Thus, literature has become one of the means through which cultural sentiments are projected and expressed. For a long time, Africans have been subjected to cultural imposition and displacement of Western culture. This paper aims to examine the theory that considers the superiority of westernization. This study adopts the sociological theory by focusing on Soyinka's Death and the King’s Horseman and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Dilemma of Ghost. Our decision to select these two texts is informed by the several instances of conflict portrayed in the two texts. The discussion focused on societal norms and belief systems, psychological and generational gap conflicts.

Artifacts are immensely useful to scholars who want to learn about a culture. When an artifact is conserved to retain its current condition, it preserves the truth of the historical story for generations to come. The Manhyia Palace Museum of Kumasi Metropolis (in Ghana) is one of the places where historical artifacts of the Ashantis (also known as the Asantes) have been preserved. However, some of the names of these artifacts remain unknown to the general public. Just as many people are ignorant about the symbolic meanings of these artifacts, the users and the occasions for utilizing such artifacts have not been documented. In light of these gaps, this study seeks to unearth the historical headgears of Asantehene. Relying principally on the qualitative research methods, the ethnographic research design was employed to gather data from four (4) sub-chiefs of Kumasi and two (2) curators of the Manhyia Palace Museum, who were purposively selected. In-depth interviews and observation were used to solicit data from the respondents. The findings of the research revealed some significance of the headgear and its physical features. Based on the conclusion, recommendations such as methods of preserving such historical artefacts have been suggested.

‘Oedipus the King’ is an ancient tragic play that tells the story of King Oedipus of Thebes, who lived about a period before the proceedings of the Trojan War. Gradually, this King came to the realization that he had accidentally slaughtered Laius, his father, and married Jocasta, his biological mother. Fate, conflict, and free will (i.e. the inexorableness of oracular prophecies) are the main themes of the text. This paper examines selected stage directions in Oedipus the King, a text written by Sophocles. A purposive sample technique was used in selecting these stage directions. In linguistics, language, and literary criticism, 'referentiality' is usually deployed to describe the connotational and denotational sense of an entity to explicate the association between language and extralinguistic object. So, content analysis design, through referentiality, was deployed in critiquing and exhuming the hidden meanings of the selected stage directions. Thus, the use of the referentiality model coupled with definiteness and indefiniteness facilitated the unearthing of familiarity, identifiability, and uniqueness from the selected extracts. The paper is structured in four thematic areas: the introduction, methods, analysis and discussion, and conclusion.

From classical to contemporary periods, the teaching and learning of a second language have conscientiously been guided by pedagogical theories, ideologies, methods, rules, and regulations. The Interaction Hypothesis (IH) is one theory that advocates face-to-face contact between the learner and the facilitator. Although some media for physical contact and communication were mentioned in the Interaction Hypothesis, with time and the advent of technology, many better strategies have emerged. Therefore, this paper assesses some traditional and modern pedagogical strategies for oral language development that were not captured in the Interaction Hypothesis. The paper aims to expose second language teachers and learners to some new techniques and guidelines for oral language development and to reinforce the classical techniques cited in earlier research works. Our paper is segmented into four parts – introduction, empirical evidence of IH, pedagogical strategies for stimulating IH in second language classrooms, and conclusion.

This paper reviews Williams’ (2013) assessment of the language-in-education policies of three African countries – Malawi, Zambia, and Rwanda. Williams’ (2013) paper, therefore, constitutes the main data of our review paper. The methodology used was descriptive design. Specifically, content analysis was used in reviewing the main sections of Williams’ (2013) paper. The current paper has four sections. These are introduction; language-in-education policies in Malawi, Zambia, and Rwanda; the research design, findings, and conclusion of Williams (2013); and the conclusion. We anticipate that the review would provide useful information for educationists, language planning and policymakers, researchers, and all key stakeholders.

Just as tragic heroes and heroines have been identified with different eras and cultures, the classical ideal of the classical and post-classical Renaissance will be incomplete if the concept of tragedy is not focalized. This paper, therefore, looks at how both periods delineated their tragic heroes, based on their actions portrayed in the plots of their plays. The paper, using textual analysis, provides extracts from William Shakespeare's King Lear, as the main text to present King Lear as the post-classical tragic hero. This is juxtaposed with extracts from Sophocles’ King Oedipus, as the main text, and Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, as a hero supporting text to present Oedipus as the classical hero. Whereas textual analysis shows that the delineation of the tragic hero lies in the source of the tragic situation – the concept of hamartia of the classical period, the post-classical Renaissance period portrays the tragic hero on the basis of the weakness of character.

Based on the theory of existentialism, this study seeks to find out Ama Ata Aidoo’s view on how illiteracy affects the African Woman in her drama, Anowa, which was published in 1970. The text depicts the illiterate woman as being powerful woman in African society. However, Ama Ata Aidoo posits that illiteracy makes the woman a pathetic individual who is not able to function effectively in this changing world. This study seeks to deepen the appreciation of Ama Ata Aidoo’s Anowa, by contributing to the understanding of Aidoo’s attitude to the illiterate Ghanaian woman (and for that matter African woman) who is seen as a powerful matriarch, but frustrated by African society as a result of lack of formal education. The available literature was explored to find what other writers have said on Aidoo’s Anowa. We used the method of qualitative content analysis in our analysis. The findings of the study show that Ama Ata Aidoo uses her writing to satirize societal weaknesses for her readers to refrain from committing such wrongs. Her illiterate women characters in Anowa are bent on maintaining their traditions and are not prepared for change. Consequently, Aidoo uses the character, Anowa, to depict change in African societies.

Poetry

Bialystok (2015) argues that the bilingual’s cognitive benefit is related to the continuous supervision and the need for conflict resolution that happens when dual languages are co-activated. One framework that clearly projects the experience of the bilingual, in terms of swapping languages is the bilingual’s language modes (BLMs) by Grosjean (2001). In this review paper, we have highlighted the policy of medium of instruction for teaching English in primary schools in Ghana. Again, we have briefly described the tenants of the BLMs, and demonstrated how these modes can be applied on the Ghanaian bilingual primary schools. On the basis of the BLMs, we argue that the most suitable medium of instruction for teaching and learning of English as a second language at the primary level (primary 1 - 6) of a diverse Ghanaian multilingual society should be English language, and the mother tongue of the community within which the school is situated. This argument is in conformism with Anyidoho (2009), and Owusu et al. (2015). Consequently, this paper would enable the key stakeholders of Ghanaian primary schools, to reexamine the policy of instruction for teaching English in Ghanaian primary schools, by placing prominence on the first language of the various speech communities in Ghana.&nbsp

This paper examines the effect of shadow reading strategy on secondary school students’ listening comprehension skills and motivation. These participants, who constituted the human subjects for the study, were ninth-year students pursuing other subjects in Arabic and learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) as well. The research questions asked to accomplish the purpose of the study focused on: (1) Determining listening comprehension skills suitable for the EFL secondary school students; (2) Finding out differences in listening comprehension test regarding the experimental and control group; and (3) Finding out differences in listening motivation scale scores regarding experimental and control group. Three instruments – designed by the researchers – that include: (listening comprehension skills checklist, listening comprehension skills test and listening motivation scale) were used. Results showed that the regular method used to teach listening is not as significant as the shadow reading strategy that developed listening comprehension skills and motivation. Consequently, the experimental group students outperformed their counterparts (the control group) in listening comprehension skills and motivation scores.

Generally, language experts believe that there are inherent ideologies in language use. The aspect of discourse study that discloses such ideologies is known as Critical Discourse Study (CDA). This paper seeks to exhume the various inherent ideologies that presuppose selected news reports on the Nigeria’s 2019 General Elections in Nigerian newspapers. This study is, however, corpus-based. Scholars have established that discourse is a kind of constructively conditioned public exercise. They believe that power relations exist at different levels of daily social interaction; revealing superiority or inferiority of interlocutors involved. News reports relating to the General Elections were electronically collated from the various newspaper platforms for a sizable language corpus. The name Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was selected and analysed purposively with the aid of Digital Humanities (DH) tool to observe the frequency of the acronym INEC and the textual context in which it occurs in five newspapers’ reports about the electoral body via the authority it gives; the warning it issues, and the appeal it makes to the stakeholders. The paper finds out that the negative perceptions of many observers about the elections have actually been predicted by the various reports in the newspapers, prior to the elections. The paper concludes that reporters of news items do not account for issues concerning electoral body with the same constructive and destructive dispositions; and this gives room for subjectivity and prejudice.

This paper investigated communication as a tool for achieving organisational objectives. Again, the paper explored the influence that communication has on the operations of organisations. The study adopted descriptive survey design. A simple random sampling technique was used in sampling a sample size of 35 staff from the staff of Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA), Suame-Maakro, Branch, Kumasi, Ghana. The main instrument used for collecting data was questionnaire. The findings showed that spoken or oral communication is the dominant channel of communication that is often used at that workplace. The findings also revealed that the views of employees need to be considered when choosing the right channel of communication. Again, it was realized that poor leadership prevents organisations from achieving their objectives. Effective channel of communication was seen to have a positive influence on the performance of workers. Consequently, managers should be proactive when they are choosing communication channels. The study recommended that the management of GRA, Suame-Maakro Branch should employ measures that would enhance the effective use of spoken or oral communication.