IDEOLOGICAL REPRESENTATIONS IN SELECTED DISCOURSES OF COLLEGES OF EDUCATION ACADEMIC STAFF UNION AND THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT

Abstract

Labour discourse, especially in education sector, is a discursive brand whose contents have continued to engage scholars’ attention both within and outside Nigeria. Existing researches have focused significantly on contents within the university space, particularly ASUU/FGN with little attention on other tertiary subsectors, including Colleges of Education. This study therefore examined ideological representations in the discourse of Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union (COEASU) in a bid to examine discursive strategies deployed to articulate discourse issues and linguistic elements used in projecting certain ideological postures. This study adopted van Dijk’s Ideological Square Model of Critical Discourse Analysis. The data were sourced from ten (10) purposively selected communiqués and decision extracts from 2018 to 2022 through the National Secretariat of COEASU. The study revealed that leadership of COEASU use discursive strategies such as apparent empathy (01 or 4.5%), example (04 or 18.1%), implicature/presupposition (03 or 13.6%), lexicalisation (04 or 18.1%), number game (04 or 18.1%), positive self-presentation/negative other-presentation (04 or 18.1%) and vagueness (03 or 13.6%). This study concluded that certain ideologies, including passing a vote of confidence, expressing doubt or belief, were foregrounded in the Union’s choice of language. This study further revealed that lexical choices are deliberately made to project certain meanings, positions, as well as to substantiate and exemplify claims, engage in blame game, while also being diplomatic and tactical.