LANGUAGE NEEDS OF JOURNALISM TRAINEES OF THE NATIONAL TELEVISION AUTHORITY COLLEGE, JOS: IMPLICATION FOR PEDAGOGY

This study examined the "Language Needs of Journalism Trainees of The National
Television Authority College, Jos: Implication for Pedagogy", with a view to
examining whether or not the trainees of NTA College are taught the English
language skills to be used in their field of profession. The descriptive survey design
was adopted for the study and a four-point Likert scale model of questionnaire was
used as research instrument to elicit data from the respondents for the study. Also,
checklist and in-depth interview were used for data collection in this study. These
were validated by the Supervisors and their reliability index was 0.89. The
population for the study was one-hundred and twenty (120) journalism trainees
and three (3) course instructors of the Department of Journalism. Using the ballot
sampling technique, 100 trainees were selected from the population. Also, all the
three course instructors were participants in the study. The simple percentage
counts, frequency distribution, mean scores, and Pearson Product Moment
Correlation Coefficient were the statistical tools used to analyze the data. The
findings indicate that trainees of NT A College, Jos and their course instructors
needthe listening, speaking. reading, and writing skills as well as grammar in their
field of profession. On the basis of these findings, the study majorly recommended
that: (i) trainees of Journalism should be taught the listening skills for effective
comprehension of spoken words of discussants and interviewees and to overcome
the problem of mother-tongue interference; (ii) trainees should be taught speaking
skills in order to know the difforence between American and British English both in
the area of spelling and pronunciation; (iii) trainees should be taught reading
skills in order to correctly pronounce names of places, persons, cultural events
within and outside the country; (iv) trainees should be adequately taught writing
skills in order to overcome the problem of malapropism and verbosity ; (v) trainees
should be taught grammatical elements such as control of the use of words in
sentence, subject-verb agreement, English sentence, syntax, punctuation marks,
questions tags.