English News Research Articles

Discrepancies in the portrayal of the COVID-19 vaccine in Chinese and US international media outlets: A corpus-based discursive news values analysis

ABSTRACT This article compares the discursive construction of news values in English news reporting of China Daily and CNN about the COVID-19 vaccine, to reveal how the two media packaged the vaccine and improved the acceptance of the international community towards the vaccines made in the respective countries. Adopting corpus linguistic methods and Discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through keywords, nomination strategies, and photographs. The results show that the two media outlets constructed the news value of Eliteness dominantly through a systematic combination of words and images, albeit in different ways. China Daily prominently consists of references to China's international communications in the production and application of the COVID-19 vaccine, at the same time packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as foreign aid to enhance diplomatic relations as well as protect and promote the order of the international community. In contrast, CNN chiefly demonstrates references to domestic medical experts and the well-known manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine, packaging the COVID-19 vaccine as the US’ medical/commercial product. The respective ways in which they portray the COVID-19 vaccine have helped to bolster the acceptance of each country's vaccine by the international community.

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

Digital media economy: business models and financial challenges in three Indian English digital native news websites

“Where got I that truth?” An analysis of external sources in English and Persian news reports on Syria

While there has been a plethora of inquiries into reported speech, a cross-linguistic analysis of the source segments in political news reports is still a rarity. This study aims at a three-fold investigation: first, tracking the frequency, transparency, and types of the sources; second, identifying the strategies employed to introduce these sources in text, and third, interrogating the contextual elements. To this end, a bottom-up analysis of 120 news reports from four quality newspapers (Kayhan and Jomhouri-e Eslami from Iran and The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal from the U.S.), mainly informed by van Leeuwen’s (1996) model of social actors, was carried out. The findings suggest a heavy reliance of both sets of newspapers on external sources to fulfill their vested interests, although they varied significantly with respect to frequency, transparency, and type.

Analytics of Indian English News Articles Through Deep Learning

Analytics of Indian English News Articles Through Deep Learning

Exploration and Practice of University English Teaching Reform in Application-Oriented Undergraduate Colleges under the Background of New Liberal Arts—A Case Study of Course of English News Compilation

Exploration and Practice of University English Teaching Reform in Application-Oriented Undergraduate Colleges under the Background of New Liberal Arts—A Case Study of Course of English News Compilation

Analysis of Errors Made by a Sample of Omani Students in Translating English News Headlines into Arabic

Analysis of Errors Made by a Sample of Omani Students in Translating English News Headlines into Arabic

Mother Tongue Interference in EFL Students’ Writing

Understanding the similarities and differences between English, as the target language, and Indonesian, as the native language, is an essential thing for students to know if they want to master English. One problem as the most challenging thing for students is to express themselves in English appropriately, orally or written. The student’s original language, Indonesian, interferes with their ability to compose English sentences correctly, especially in writing. It is essential to find and identify errors made by students of English, in this case, the interference of Indonesian in writing. Therefore, this study was conducted to analyze the interference of Indonesian in students English writing. This study provides an analysis of the interference of Indonesian on English writing made by EFL students. The data for the study is collected from essay writing on a descriptive text by 32 university students in the fourth semester majoring in English and whose native language is Indonesian. Those 32 students were purposively chosen as samples since they sit in one class and had the Essay writing Course. The students then asked to write about two pages of descriptive essays on specific exciting topics for them. It is found that there are a total of 359 Indonesian interferences on the students’ English writing. The findings suggest valuable strategies to aid students in developing their writing skills, such as viewing English-language movies, reading English books or articles, and listening to English news and music.

PROMOTION AND DISSEMINATION OF WULIANGYE YIBIN CULTURE IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD BASED ON PYTHON SEMANTIC ANALYSIS

The promotion and dissemination of Chinese Baijiu globally has become a hot topic in recent years. As Sichuan Baijiu gains popularity in both the international and domestic markets, the exploration of its global road is becoming increasingly important. This study focuses on the global path of Wuliangye Yibin culture and aims to propose strategies for promoting and disseminating it in the English-speaking world. This study makes use of an online English corpus and Python natural language processing technology to create a small Wuliangye Yibin English news corpus (WNC). This study then analyzes the frequency distribution and emotional tendency of adjectives related to the corpus, ultimately promoting and disseminating Wuliangye Yibin culture in Englishspeaking world. These include enhancing Wuliangye Yibin’s online presence, improving the quality of promotional materials translations, and targeting specific English-speaking audiences. Overall, this research serves as a valuable refence for the promotion of Chinese Baijiu culture on the global stage while adhering to China’s laws and regulation

Fake News Classification Web Service for Spanish News by using Artificial Neural Networks

The use of digital media, such as social networks, has promoted the spreading of fake news on a large scale. Therefore, several Machine Learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks, have been used for fake news detection and classification. These techniques are widely used due to their learning capabilities. Besides, models based on artificial neural networks can be easily integrated into social media and websites to spot fake news early and avoid their propagation. Nevertheless, most fake news classification models are available only for English news, limiting the possibility of detecting fake news in other languages, such as Spanish. For this reason, this study proposes implementing a web service that integrates a deep learning model for the classification of fake news in Spanish. To determine the best model, the performance of several neural network architectures, including MLP, CNN, and LSTM, was evaluated using the F1 score., and LSTM using the F1 score. The LSTM architecture was the best, with an F1 score of 0.746. Finally, the efficiency of web service was evaluated, applying temporal behavior as a metric, resulting in an average response time of 1.08 seconds.

Automated Detection of Voice in News Text – Evaluating Tools for Reported Speech and Speaker Recognition

The automated content analysis of text has become integral to contemporary communication and journalism research. However, automated approaches are seldom utilized to analyze reported voice in text, while doing so would offer valuable insights into media and communication practices. Bridging the fields of communication science and computational linguistics, this study reviews and evaluates off-the-shelf tools for automated voice detection (of direct/indirect speech and of speakers) with respect to user experience and validity. Manually annotated English news articles and Twitter data served as baseline for evaluating the automated detection of voice. Findings indicate that the tools being assessed offer a satisfactory user experience and provide promising solutions for detecting direct speech automatically, encouraging fellow researchers to utilize automated detection for direct quotations. However, the recognition of indirect speech and speakers needs considerable improvement.

Тематические фреймы в конструировании образа города зарубежными СМИ

The key research question is what image of the city of Chelyabinsk, and Chelyabinsk region is built in the English-spoken media of Asia-Pacific region and African countries. The paper aims to analyze the key actors within the frame theory and how frames can be applied to build the image of the city and region. It also deals with frame effects on the actors' responsibility. We have analyzed 443 English news texts taken from the NOW Corpus. The main research method is frame analysis. According to S. Iyengar, there are thematic and episodic news frames. The research findings reveal that thematic frames (97%) prevailed overepisodic ones (3%). A thematic news frame creates a generalized image of Chelyabinsk and Chelyabinsk region. Thematic news frames attribute the responsibility for the city and region problems to the authorities, or government, or an object (an asteroid). Thematic news frame use emotional evaluative vocabulary, terms, action verbs, metaphors, and epithets of anthropomorphic semantics.

A Brief Analysis of Stylistic Features and Chinese Translation of News English

A Brief Analysis of Stylistic Features and Chinese Translation of News English

“As Reliable as a Kalashnikov Rifle”: How Sputnik News Promotes Russian Vaccine Technologies in the Turkish Twittersphere

Established in 2014, SputnikTR (a localized version of Sputnik News) is the most popular pro-Russian media outlet active in Turkey. The news content published by SputnikTR’s Twitter account currently attracts the highest engagement rates among the international public broadcasters active in Turkey. SputnikTR’s official Twitter account has more followers (1M) than Sputnik News English (326K). This article argues that SputnikTR’s Twitter account is used to promote Russian vaccine technologies in Turkey. We believe that it is also a conduit for the dissemination of pro-Russian as well as anti-Western narratives to the Turkish online public. Using a computational methodology, we collected 2,782 vaccine-related tweets posted by SputnikTR’s Twitter account between April 2019 and April 2021. We deployed framing as well as critical discourse analysis to study the contents of our dataset. Our findings suggest that SputnikTR uses (a) disinformation as well as misinformation in vaccine-related news and (b) unethical communication techniques to maximize engagement with content posted on Twitter. Our findings are significant insofar as they are the first documented instances of Russian propaganda efforts on Turkish Twitter. These efforts seem to be focused on promoting the Russian vaccine while encouraging public hesitancy toward Western vaccine technologies.

AI-POWERED APPS TO ENHANCE NOVICE NEWSREADERS’ ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION

Among the goals that Communication students, who are ESP learners, desire to achieve is to become professional newsreaders who can deliver the news in both Indonesian and English. These novice newsreaders with little to no knowledge about news delivery in English often face problems with English pronunciation. This study aims to help forty-one novice newsreaders, who are students of the Islamic Broadcasting and Communication Department, with their English pronunciation using AI-powered apps and to reveal their perceptions of the apps. The students were involved in one cycle of Classroom Action Research (CAR), where they had to make a video of them reading English news before using the apps as the pre-test and another video after the lecturer taught them how to use the apps as the post-test. The researcher distributed a questionnaire via Google Form after the post-test to complete the data. The results show that AI-powered apps can enhance novice newsreaders’ English pronunciation, especially in the aspects of Accuracy, Key Words, Chunking and Pausing, Intonation, as well as Sounds and Vocal Features; yet, Intonation becomes the lowest improved aspect. Also, the respondents believed that the apps help them with their future job as newsreaders, are easy to use, and give instant feedbacks, which are necessary for independent learning and suitable for ESP learners. The ELSA app rose to the top of the list of the respondents’ favorites. Finally, it is recommended that future researchers carry out comparable studies that focus on one or two particular English sounds evaluated across multiple cycles.

IMPROVING STUDENTS’ SPEAKING ABILITY THROUGH NEWS RETELLING

This paper involves researching, Improving The Students’ Speaking Through News Retelling. A Thesis. Language and Arts Faculty of State University of Makassar. The objective of the research was to find out whether the use of English News Retelling can improve students’ speaking ability. The research applied a pre- experimental meyhod with one group pretest and posttest design. The pre-test was given to know to what extent the students speaking ability and post-test was given to identify the students achievement after treatment. The population of this research was the second year students os SMK Tamalatea Makassar and used purposive sampling technique. The variable of the research were the use of English News Retelling as the independent variable and the students speaking ability as dependent variable. The result of the data indicate that was significant difference between the mean score of pre-tset and the post-test of the students. The value of t-table (1.729) was higer than t-test (34.0) at level of significant (p)= 0.5 and the degree of freedom (df)= n-1 . it can be concluded that English New retelling can improve students speaking ability

Flipped classroom in ESP teaching and learning: An Activity Theory perspective


 Flipped classroom as an instructional approach has gained increasing attention in English language teaching and learning, including English for Specific Purposes (ESP). This article examined a cohort of Chinese university students’ experiences of learning News English (an ESP-oriented course) through pre-class micro-lesson videos as part of flipped classroom. The data included task sheets accompanying the micro-lesson videos prepared by the teachers as well as interviews with the students about their learning experiences, think-aloud sessions and learning diaries. Adopting an Activity Theory perspective, we were able to identify notable differences between the teacher-designed pre-class activity system and the activity system actually experienced by the students. The study also demonstrated the complicating effect of students’ critical thinking disposition on the dynamics of their micro-lesson learning. The findings are discussed in relation to ESP teacher development, in particular regarding the development of technological pedagogical content knowledge for effective design and delivery of flipped classroom.
 

Sourcing and framing in cancer control continuum: A content analysis of Malaysian English and Chinese online cancer news.

In health news production, sourcing and framing are two critical mechanisms that influence how newsreaders think about and perceive the severity of a health issue. Understanding how local media covers the cancer control continuum is vital. However, very limited studies have looked at the effect of sourcing and framing in cancer news coverage, and it is still unknown how sources and news frames shape cancer coverage, especially in non-Western countries. This study examines framing and sourcing patterns in news stories reporting on cancer control in Malaysian mainstream (English) and ethnicity (Chinese) online news sites, uncovering underlining associations between essential news components, source, and framing. We used a predesigned code book to conduct a quantitative content analysis on cancer news stories (n = 841) published on two Malaysian English and Chinese online news sites from 2017 to 2019. Cancer news received adequate coverage in Malaysian English and Chinese media and was also session-centered. Two logistic regression models demonstrated the internal relationships between sourcing, framing, and different elements in cancer coverage. In terms of news sources, the results revealed that medical journals were the most likely to be cited when the news focused on medical research, followed by primary cancer prevention. When the news concentrated on statistical cancer reports and environmental/occupational risk factors, government agencies were more likely to be interviewed. Of news frames, when the news articles engaged with medical institutions and mentioned medical publications, the lifestyle frame was very likely to be shown, but the environmental frame was more likely to be portrayed when interviewing medical practitioners. This study is the first comprehensive assessment to analyze and compare Malaysian English and Chinese online cancer news coverages and uncover underlying associations between news components, sourcing, and framing paradigms. We contributed to the scholarly understanding of cancer news coverage. This study can serve as a model for future health promotion researchers, journalists, and policymakers. Implications for cancer risk communication research, health journalist practices, and health policymaking were discussed.

How the Arrangement of Attitude Resources Can Strengthen the Objectivity of News Reports

As Xiongan New Area in China is designed to attract international innovation elements, its publicity to the international community has become a prerequisite for the realization of its designed goal. Innovative talents who have a higher critical thinking ability constitute one essential part of the target readers of English news reports about Xiongan. In order to convince them of the brilliant future of the city, reporters need to arrange attitude resources in an objective way when expressing reporters’ appraisal about this city. Based on the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the current study finds that reporters attempt to use attitude resources to modify inanimate things in present and past tenses, as well as in passive voice. In addition, there is no attitude resources in expressing the essential concept guiding the construction of the city. All of these are considered to contribute to the enhancement of the objectivity of news reports and be of great help to present a more convincing image of Xiongan.

Adequacy, fluency and cognitive processes: evidence from translating English news articles into Arabic

ABSTRACT This article reports on an empirical study on cognitive processes [i.e. (dis) fluency, temporal management of the translation process, and revision] and their relationship with fluency and adequacy. Based on Jakobsen and Schou’s (1999) computational model of human translation, the author utilizes keylogging data retrieved from a Translog-II-based task to investigate the cognitive processes behind Arab translator trainees’ translations of an English news article into Arabic and unfold whether these processes predict fluency and adequacy (N = 32). Results demonstrate trainees’ segmentation of a news article into frequent short lexical segments manifested in the mean translation units (M = 141.34, SD = 44.37), reliance on online revision over end revision, and temporal delay in the drafting stage. Multiple-line regression analysis shows that translation quality is predicted by revision time, orientation time, and translation speed in addition to a positive association between translation units and translation adequacy. According to the findings, translation trainees should be equipped with ST comprehension, and TT production and revision skills.