Authors: Kingsley Akinade Ajayi
Abstract: Teaching English grammar to Nigerian learners has long rested on the idea that a learner’s first language leaves its mark on the second, yet few studies have tied that idea to a modern account of how grammatical features are checked and spelled out. This paper takes the contrastive findings of a Minimalist study of Standard English and Ebira Tao and asks what they mean for the classroom. The data were thirty Ebira constructions elicited from three bilingual speakers in Okene, each paired with an English equivalent and analysed in the TP, vP and CP domains. Every contrast in tense, aspect, number, case and negation was examined against four criteria drawn from the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis: whether Ebira has a matching category, how far the English form lies from the Ebira form, whether English bundles features that Ebira keeps apart, and how easily the English marker is overlooked. The result is a hierarchy of difficulty with eight levels, running from shared word order and time reference at the base to stacked auxiliaries at the top. The analysis suggests that Ebira learners rarely lack the syntactic categories that English needs. Their main task is to learn how English spells those categories out. The paper draws up a staged teaching sequence that builds on what Ebira already provides, and it sets out implications for teachers, materials writers and curriculum planners. Because the hierarchy is predicted from contrast and not observed in learner output, it is offered as a set of claims to be tested
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23281411
