Dissemination of Human Values: Discourse Analysis of Global Educational Media Texts

Abstract

The failure of the last century is not in teaching language skills but in disseminating human values necessary for people to live in harmony in the world. Media is an important means through which human values can be disseminated. With a didactic intent, maxims are common sense logical statements that explicitly or implicitly disseminate human values in discourse. Yemen Times, which provides the data for analysis in this study, is an independent English-language newspaper that can be accessed online and available in hardcopy form. It plays the role of disseminating information about politics, sports, tourism, economics and education. This study aims to identify human values in the discourse of maxims as a global educational media text. Human values are viewed as neutral discourse shared among humanity. This view is theoretically guided by the objectivist perspective on discourse. 152 maxims were collected between the years 2003 to 2010. Discourse analysis was conducted to identify values beyond the sentence level where ‘whole-text organization’ was the unit of analysis. Three linguistic features were used: ‘word meanings’, ‘wording’ and ‘metaphors’. The findings revealed that 33 human values were disseminated in the texts such as wisdom, work, knowledge, perseverance, time, and friendship. The implications of this study highlight the role of media as a fundamental learning resource for English as International Language (EIL) students. Further research on the discursive legitimation of the identified values is recommended.