Title:   UTILIZING CRITICAL THINKING AS MODEL FOR PEACE-BUILDING IN MULTICULTURAL COMMUNICATION IN ENGLISH CLASSES IN NIGERIAN UNIVERSITIES

Abstract
Prevalent political, social and economic driven conflicts in Nigeria make it a fragile country. These
necessitate peace-building. Communication in English (CiE) is one of the General Studies (GS)
courses in Nigerian Universities. The classes are multicultural drawing students from divergent
cultural and pseudo-cultural backgrounds. As a result, this study was conceived with the intention
of investigating the efficacy of adopting Critical Thinking (CT), a 21st Century skill, for peacebuilding
in multicultural CiE classes. In order to achieve this, thirty (30) volunteers from different
cultural and ideological leanings were exposed to seven CiE II topics as stipulated in the
Benchmark Academic Standards (BMAS) of the National Universities Commission (NUC). They
were taught via the CT model for fifteen weeks (two hours in each week). The first and the last
weeks were for pre-test and post-test respectively. It was found that CT can be utilized to actuate
affective disposition towards peace-building in multicultural CiE classes in Nigerian Universities in
the participants. It is recommended that the class size reduction for CiE classes should be
emphasized. In addition, the facilitators of the project should not only possess procedural and
declarative knowledge of English language arts but must have the skills of pragmatics, conflict
sensitivity and advocacy. It is envisioned that products of such multicultural English learning
classes would contribute towards peace-building in a multicultural and fragile Nigeria.

Citations:

Publication Date: 2021-07-09