The Relationship between Language, Literature, Teacher Effectiveness and Quality Education

Abstract

The issue of declining quality of education in Nigeria is of serious national concern and quality language education is not an exception. A wide range of factors have been pointed out by experts as being responsible for this situation. Our purpose in this paper is to discuss possible ways of improving on the quality of language education being that the quality of an educational system cannot transcend that of the teachers. The paper contends that for quality language education to be provided, the teacher must be effective; he must be well grounded in both language and literature to effectively impart quality language education. The paper examines the interwoven relationship between language and literature and postulates that merely having many years of classroom experience does not automatically make one an effective teacher. It also discusses several other methods that could be adopted in teaching so as to improve on the quality of language education being provided. The paper concludes that the delicate relationship between language, literature and effective teaching must be sufficiently appreciated by the language teacher in order for the objectives of language course to be attained.