Abstract

The primary purpose for teaching any language is to improve the communicative competence of learners. Over the years, several researches on language education have been carried out to investigate the various ways of enhancing the spoken as well as the written forms of the English language used by students across the globe. The researches bordered on the challenges and prospects of teaching and learning English such as the impact that the human thoughts and feelings as well as the stages of a child’s development has on his language use; and how the teaching and learning of language has been fostered by using different social variables to explore the sociolinguistic concept of language disadvantage. Thus, sociolinguistics which studies the relationships between the social and linguistic variables of a communicative event has contributed immensely to language education. However, the outcomes of such studies still reveal a high level of deficiency and incompetence in the English used by learners even after graduation from the various tertiary institutions in Africa. This is evident in the high level of dissatisfaction of lecturers with the use of English language by students in Nigerian tertiary institutions to produce their essays, assignments, and examinations, and spoken expressions, which are plagued with, slangs and pidgin forms. In view of the fact that Nigeria is a multi lingual speech community; and that there is a mutual relationship between language use and the context within which the language is used, this paper will to examine the roles played by the context of language learning and use. Consequently, this paper will discover innovative and fresh approaches to the teaching of English at the Nigerian higher educational level in order to enable learners attain better levels of proficiency in the use of English. It is expected that this study will provide strategic plans to enhance the learning of the English language in Nigerian higher institutions as a template for other multilingual African nations. In view of the fact that Nigeria is a multi lingual speech community; and that there is a mutual relationship between language use and the context of use The primary purpose for teaching any language is to improve the communicative competence of learners. The teaching of English in Africa is either carried out as a second language for the Anglophone African countries; and as a foreign language for other francophone …. Over the years, several researches on language education have been carried out to investigate the various ways of enhancing the spoken as well as the written forms of the English language used by students and different classes of people across the globe. The researches bordered on different ways that the human thoughts and feelings are controlled and impact man’s language use; how a child’s stages of development influence the nature of his language use and development; and how the teaching and learning of language has been fostered by using different social variables to explore the sociolinguistic concept of language disadvantage. Thus, sociolinguistics which studies the relationships between the social and linguistic variables of a communicative event has contributed immensely to educational research generally and language education specifically. However, the focus of this paper is to explore the relationship between language teaching in tertiary institutions and learners’ cultural backgrounds within a second language situation which is multilingual in nature, and find out how to enhance learners’ level of communicative competence in spite of their diverse backgrounds. By implication, this paper will investigate the roles played by the context of language learning and use, the impact of these roles on the cognition of learners, and the strategic plans to enhance the learning of English in Nigerian higher institutions as a template for other multilingual African nations. how the different cultural backgrounds of learners/ speakers of English in higher educational institutions can shape their use and levels of competence in the language.