PARADIGM SHIFT IN NIGERIAN LANGUAGE TEACHER DEVELOPMENT: AGENDA FOR PROFESSIONAL REBIRTH

Abstract

Development is a key concept in this discourse and it is a concept which social science scholars have given a panoply of interpretations based on their philosophical orientations. Development economists such as Okereke and Ekpe (2002:5) have noted that development is an instrumental process of over-coming persistent poverty, absorbing surplus labour and diminishing inequality. Walter Rodney cited in Okereke and Ekpe (2002) argues from the Marxist perceptive to posit that development …. is a many-sided process which, at the level of the individual, implies increased skills and capacity, greater freedom, creativity, self-discipline, responsibility and material wellbeing… At the level of social groups, it implies an increased capacity to regulate both internal and external relations…. In the past, development has always meant the increase in the ability to guard the independence of the social groupâ€. No matter from what angle anybody looks at the concept, development implies growth.