T. Abioye

Strategic communication for climate change awareness and behavioural change in Ota Local Government of Ogun State

Background: The use of mutli-sectoral communication on human’s handling processes of environment is not popular in the literature as crucial factor in winning the war against climate change and its attendant problems of greenhouse pollution, global warming and destruction of lives and properties. Objective: The study investigates the practices surrounding climate change and its awareness in Ado Odo/Ota local government of Ogun State. Methods: The survey data obtained from randomly selected 970 residents in Ado-Odo/Ota local government was complimented with six key indepth interview with opinion leaders. Results: The findings show that the current behaviours surrounding climate change in the study location includes burning of waste and bush (41.1%), indiscriminate disposal of waste (18.1%), the use of kerosene (45.4%), fire wood (6.4%) and coal for domestic purposes (3.3%). Conclusion: The study recommends multi-sectoral communication strategy (MCS) and the use of television for effective climate change awareness campaign for behaviour modification

A pragma-semiotic analysis of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria

Abstract In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian government on 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement, embarked on different mass strike actions and demonstrations including online activism. The civil resistant actions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increase deployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the government and its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourse in Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourse analysis approaches in examining issues of identity and self-determination with little attention paid to visual-pragmatic strategies in representing people and their actions. This article, therefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representing people and their actions in the event. Seventy-two online protest posts purposively sampled from the groups’ page are used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elements and functions in the representations using insights from Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal mode complements the visual in projecting the demands and resistance of the group. The posts which are classified under six semantic fields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation, exaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have various visual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling, humour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, including photo trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmatic acts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling and stipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian socio-political and linguistic context.

Perception of Undergraduate Newspaper Readers on the Role of the Media in Literacy Development in Nigeria

This study investigated the perception of undergraduate newspaper readers at the Covenant University, Ota, Southwestern Nigeria, on how literacy and the media can interact to achieve enhanced language use. A questionnaire was administered to a purposively selected sample of two hundred and twelve subjects and the results were statistically analyzed using chi square and cross tabs. It was found, among other things, that although most newspaper readers read because they want to be informed and educated, some are discouraged from reading because of the level of language use in some of these papers. In spite of geolinguistic and socio-cultural differences, the study shows that the perception of literacy among Nigerian undergraduates remain basically the same; and readers are of the opinion that the media can promote both literacy and language use/development, particularly in a second language situation such as Nigeria. The implications of the findings are highlighted and conclusions are drawn. Keywords: perception, newspaper readers, literacy, media, language use/development