A Professor of English language at the University of Port
Harcourt, Nkem Okoh has released a new guide to “usage and grammar” in English.
The book will be presented to the public on Saturday, November 4, 2017 at
Ebitimi Banigo Auditorium at the University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
In the book titled: Keep Your Language Clean, the author
avoids what he calls the teaching of mere grammar and the mere teaching of
grammar. He considers grammar a means to, even a handmaiden of, usage. The
work, according to him, is “indeed concerned with producing, not language
learners, but language users.”
The central imagery explored by the book concerns keeping
our language clean. Okoh argues that while people are commonly concerned about
their personal hygiene, Nigerians ought also to give even more attention to
linguistic hygiene.
Considering the great apathy and lackadaisical attitude to
language use in our society, the book remains the result of the author’s
longstanding concern or dissatisfaction with the common malaise of poor
linguistic usage in the country.
While all the language skills are, of course, important, the
book identifies the immediacy of the oral medium, appropriately underscoring it
by giving more attention to oral skills as a crucial component of keeping our
language clean.
In its organization, the book pursues a simple,
straightforward A–Z pattern, with the individual language points arranged
alphabetically. Such an alphabetical arrangement gives the book a far more
user-friendly look, making it also not just a textbook but also a reference
work.
This, the author agrees, will enable the reader to go
directly to the grammatical, usage or collocation item desired, without
necessarily reading the book from cover to cover.
Okoh, has had a relatively long academic career, teaching at
the University of Port Harcourt and other universities. With an ESP background,
he has 40 years’ university experience of language teaching, in addition to
teaching literature courses.
He has also published extensively, both locally and
internationally, variously exploring diverse dimensions of literature as well
as the new Englishes.
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