Lingua inglese

Evaluation in media discourse

Aims of course

• By the end of the course you will have gained

• Awareness of text features

• Knowledge of metalanguage

• Experience of text analysis

• Analytical skills

• Greater English language competence

Media language

• English language media discourse is an important resource for political scientists

• To be able to use this resource is an asset

• English language newspapers and television news provide language practice and political content

• Data collection from these sources can be an important research tool

English media discourse: a corpus based approach to evaluation and

attribution.

• This course aims to introduce students to the English language resources of evaluation and attribution in media texts (broadsheets and TV news).

• Students will be introduced to examples of media discourse research and will practice and develop descriptive and analytical skills using media texts.

• You need to be exposed to English to learn it

• The more you are exposed the more you assimilate

• Exposure means reading and listening

• You are students of politics and need to understand a variety of text types

• This course aims to give you experience of media texts in English, news discourse: TV and press.

• It aims to raise your awareness of two particular text types

• But also provide a metalanguage to describe aspects of the discourse and a methodology for analysis

• It aims also to introduce you to English language research which is of some relevance to political scientists.

• You will also practice data gathering and data analysis

• And improve your language skills.

Politics is nearly all done by language

• There are two things non native speakers find very difficult:

• to understand stance, that is to say subjective attitudes expressed in discourse

• and to understand who is taking responsibility for any one particular statement

• this why we will be concentrating on evaluation and attribution

Course structure

• A. 4 credits 30 hrs lessons; reading; tasks 1,2,3

• B. 6 credits 30 hrs lessons; reading; tasks 1,2,3 and 4 comparing either 2 paper corpora or two news programmes

C. 8 credits 30 hrs lessons; reading; 1,2,3,4 comparing 2 papers and 2 news programmes

• Task 1 :

• Record a news programme (evening news at approximately the same time)

• Provide with the DVD a list of the contents with counter numbers.

• Task 2 :

• Download 1 day from an online paper. Save as text giving date and source.

• Provide text and wordle

• Task 3

• Transcription exercise and comparisons of evaluation and attribution.

• Task 4

• Corpus comparison

• Results as presentation or tesina

Lexical features

• Lexical features: the vocabulary of a language defined in terms of the set of words and idioms given distinctive use within a variety; for example, legal English employs such expressions as heretofore, alleged and Latin expressions such as ex post facto

Grammatical features

• Grammatical features: the many possibilities of syntax and morphology, defined in terms of such factors as the distinctive use of sentence structure word order, and word inflections; for example, religious English makes use of an unusual vocative construction ( O God who knows) and second person singular set of pronouns (thou, thee, thine)

Discourse features

• discourse features: the structural organisation of a text, defined in terms of such factors as coherence, relevance, paragraph structure, and the logical progression of ideas;

• for example, a journal paper within scientific English typically consists of a fixed sequence of sections including the abstract, introduction, methodology, results, discussion and conclusion

Discourse features

• discourse features: the structural organisation of a text, defined in terms of such factors as coherence, relevance, paragraph structure, and the logical progression of ideas;

• You will be analysing texts on these different levels for the resources of evaluation and attribution

Evaluation

• Evaluation is the engine of persuasion.

• Persuading with language

Evaluation is…

“the indication that something is good or bad” (from the point of view of the speaker/writer)

Hunston 2004: 157

Evaluation as persuasion

The persuader uses evaluative language to convince his or her audience that their own opinions are good, alternative ones are not

good, that their proposals are worthy and logical

(that is, good), those of their opponents illogical or

dangerous (that is, bad), that they themselves are

honest and trustworthy (good) and maybe that

others who disagree with them are not (bad).

• signalling one’s evaluation has two major functions. First of all, it expresses group belonging by (seemingly) offering a potential service to the group by warning of bad things and advertising good ones.

• Moreover, it can assure an audience that the speaker/writer shares its same value system. In this way it helps ‘to construct and maintain relations between the speaker or writer and hearer or reader’ (Thompson and Hunston 2000: 6

• The goodness and the badness can, of course, come in many forms, we can use a two-term Linnaean-style binomial notation in describing prosodies, for example:

• [good: pleasurable], [good: profitable], [good: being in control]; [bad: dangerous], [bad: difficult], where the colon is to be read ‘because’.

Exercise

• Look at the text baout the election of Putin. What can you identify in terms of evaulative language, language which is subjective and tells you more about the writer’s attitude than facts or events