Research Productivity of Language Educators in Ondo State

This paper investigated the research productivity level of language educators in Ondo State and to investigate the constraints affecting it. The study adopted the descriptive research design, with a population comprising all the language education academic staff in Ondo State, Nigeria. Through Simple sampling technique, 213 academic staff were selected across the six higher institutions in Ondo State. The instrument used for data collection was a Questionnaire tagged: Academic staff in Language Education’s Research Productivity Questionnaire (r=0.88). Two research questions were answered. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that academic staff frequently publish textbooks, chapters in textbooks, conference papers and articles in learned journals, while they occasionally publish co-authored textbooks, patent and certified inventions and rarely publish monographs, occasional papers, scientific peer-reviewed bulletin and working papers. The observed constraints responsible for low research productivity among academic staff include their inability to locate the most appropriate information resource in the university library catalogue (1.7), too much information resources on the internet (1.5), lack of knowledge of search techniques to retrieve information resources (1.8), financial constraints (1.9) and too much time needed to locate and retrieve needed information ( 1.50). Therefore, ICT compliance training for all academic staff, provision of research grants or funding, conducive/enabling environment with constant electricity supply, accessible internet bandwidth, accessible working ICT equipment as well available and accessible information resources both in the offline library and online library repositories were recommended.

Keywords: Research, Research productivity, academic staff, Language educators, ICT