Problems Despite their advantages as teaching tools, the newspaper and the radio have posed some problems to English language teaching in Sierra Leone. For example, certain words are overused, rendering them ineffective or meaningless. The most common of these are intimate, admonish, reiterate, opine, dock , and nab which are routinely used in radio news bulletins and of course in the newspapers. In the contexts in which it is used, intimate stands for announce, reveal, explain, pronounce,acquaint, show, tell, inform, apprise, and brief , but these words are hardly used themselves. Opine obviously means to express an opinion, or view , but is increasingly used in the sense of tell, but the mass media finds the use of this uncommon word more palatable and impressive.
Dock is an enclosure where the defendant stands or sits in a criminal court.
The papers use no other words or expressions. Nab means to catch, arrest, grab, snatch, or seize but none of this range of synonyms is used. It is also now used to mean appearing in court. The reason for the invariable preference for these words is easy to discern. The major concern of the English language teacher is not just the misuse of these words, but also their monotonous overuse, which stifles the elements of originality and creativity that are so important in language teaching.