Abstract

This paper hinges on academic discourse which, as a tool-kit in knowledge industry has been the brain-box of meaningful research output, knowledge and development in the 21 century Nigerian second language pedagogy. Studies abound concentrating on conceptualisation and execution without sufficient emphasis on presentation and dissemination especially in the throes of 21st century digital and literacy challenges. This study, therefore, investigated the expedient ingredient of skill in research analysis, presentation, and classroom instructional precision that meet international standard form to examine the key role of language in effective professional communication of research outputs in the context of Nigerian second language pedagogy. Macluhan’s conceptual framework of “global village” was adopted to complement Hymes’ view of language as an index of its associated culture and fix the Nigerian second language as largely characterised by convolution of formal pedagogy and informal mis-instruction. Meeting the 21st century’s tertiary educational challenges thus requires acquiring, on one hand, the kind of English from which all forms of informal mis-instruction and confusion are eliminated, and practices that move the use of print literacy beyond simple recall, conformity and economic function into the realm of genuine social participation and creation, and transforming students into thinkers and actors as citizens through the agency of language. Radical appropriation of global intellectual strength and local environmentally conditioned curricular and extra-curricular sources of acquiring the language would bear a mutually reinforcing rather than opposing relationship, and then, forge a profound ‘glocal’ educational understanding that precludes social nemesis of disastrous educational isolationism.