Analysis of Discourse Features of Media Texts Written by Native and Non-native Writers of English : A Comparative Study

Abstract

This study attempts to analyze and compare the discourse features of media texts written by native and non-native writers of English. It attempts this hoping to find out how actually written discourse makes meaning in terms of the grammatical structures and their meanings in the social contexts. To this end, Michael Halliday's approach of Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied to carry out the analysis. SFL approach focuses on how the grammar of a language serves as a resource for making and exchanging meanings between people. It is concerned with the grammatical patterns and lexical items used in the text, as well as the choices of these items, leading to meaning understanding in relation to the social contexts. The materials for the study were collected mainly from two online newspapers articles; The Washington Post and Arab News. The analysis focused upon the interpretation and description of three levels of meanings; the ideational meaning by investigating the Process Types, the interpersonal meaning examining Mood & Modality system and the textual meaning considering the Cohesive Devices. The findings of this study could provide the basis for exploring language awareness and highlight the discourse features of media texts, in addition to the differences in discourse language between native and non-native writers of English. Some of the major findings arrived at show that the native media authors tend to write informally and use more complex sentence structure, while the non-native authors address their audience formally and focus on simple sentence structure. Based on the findings, the study recommends the application of the SFL approach in language classrooms. Finally, the researcher suggests to conduct a further study investigating the features of oral media discourse by native and nonnative speakers of English.