Evaluating the Linguistic and Pedagogical Skills of English Language Teachers in a Multilingual Milieu

This paper evaluates the linguistic and pedagogical skills of English language teachers in a multilingual milieu. The survey research method was adopted in this study. The target population for this study comprised teachers and students in public secondary schools in Ado-Ekiti. A total of one hundred teachers and one hundred students were drawn from three separate schools. A self-constructed questionnaire was carefully and specially designed to obtain the necessary data required for the execution of this study. Percentage and frequency counts were used to analyze the data. Findings revealed that language teachers evaluate pedagogical contents regularly. It showed that the aspects teachers evaluated most were the cognitive skills of grammar, followed by essay writing but it is surprising that teachers do not frequently evaluate affective skills of oral English, comprehension and dictation. Moreover, of all the linguistic skills, listening, speaking and observation were less frequently evaluated while reading and writing were averagely evaluated. Finally, findings revealed some constraints to the effective pedagogical evaluation to include large classes, non-challant attitude of students, inadequate facilities, wide syllabus, lack of motivation, incompetence and inadequate time. Based on the findings, it was recommended that regular exposure to educational opportunities where teachers could be made to learn innovative evaluative techniques should be made available in schools.