My Favorite English Bullets!

Teaching English As A Foreign Language To The Akans Of Ghana, A Case Study.

A Book Coming Soon To A Shelve Near You!

PREFACE

You will find in these pages, some common English errors committed by the Akans of Ghana, as a result of the specifics of the language one interference. This study is very interesting because the subject selected is barely literate in the English language, but has assumed the airs of an English scholar on a very popular Ghanaian website called Ghanaweb.com. Being an Akan myself gives me a sympathetic understanding of the grammatical dilemmas that the mother tongue poses as we wade through the uncharted English terrain. 

This is an occasion I could not resist. Mr. Sarpong has written several libelious comments about me on Ghanaweb simply because he disagrees with me politically. Here is also someone who demonstrates an unquenchable need to impress others as a scholar, simply because he has contempt for the political opinions of his adversaries, and wishes to condemn them, as he ever so often does, as "illiterate idiots!" His problem is that even though he is constantly trying to play on spelling and grammatical mistakes to undermine very sound political arguments, he does so with a barrage of grammatical errors of his own.

What I have found amazing is the fact that he even continues to repeat mistakes that have been corrected several times over! And here is someone who will die to write correctly in order to impress. The fact that he keeps making such mistakes, even though he would rather not make himself such a laughing-stock in a struggle he himself has provoked, explains the power of the language one interfernce in both learning and teaching of English as a foreign language.

I started following the subject on Wednesday, 11 11 200, and whenever I get the time I try to record some mistakes, publicly challenge and compel him to write correctly. His writings have improved tremendously, but the basic mistakes persist. This study seeks to record and classify such recurrent errors, trace their roots to the source of the language one interference, and help the student to overcome these very specific problems.

I invite the public to send by way of comments, any "Sarpongnese" bullet they encounter on Ghanaweb.com. Thank you very much for your co-operation. The results of this study shall be made freely available after we have been able to "harvest" at leat, one thousand "bullets" from Mr. Justice Sarpong of Houston, Texas.