Introduction
The intention of this blog is to share an article I have recently had published, provide context to the study, outline some of the findings and explore its relevance to our work in EAP and the wider CALD team.
Background
This project dates back to 2020 but for various reasons it has only now been published. Despite the delay, I am pleased to see my work in print and to have the opportunity to share it with you. The genesis for this project was the murder of George Floyd during lockdown. The online media coverage of the protests that followed caught my attention as it seemed that some publications misrepresented Black Lives Matter (BLM) and distorted the purpose of those demonstrations.
Choice of Dataset
Although other studies had considered the media’s representation of BLM, few had concentrated exclusively on bite sized news chunks such as headlines, visuals, subheadings, captions, and summaries. These features of news discourse have become increasingly salient because of advances in technology and the way consumers interact with the news, so I decided to focus on those.
I felt the logical way to do that was through a comparative analysis of three prominent online publications: the Guardian, BBC News, and the Daily Mail to understand how ideologically divergent publications covered the BLM demonstrations. The analysis was informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Social Semiotics and concentrated on discursive strategies, such as referentials (i.e., the naming of social actors) and predications (i.e., the characteristics attributes to social actors), and the linguistic devices contained within.
Relevance to CALD
Although this research was not situated in EAP, it involved analysing the structure (i.e., the locutionary act), function (i.e., the illocutionary act), intent and potential outcome (i.e., the perlocutionary act) of language in context (see, Searle, 1968; 1976). This approach to language analysis is broadly what we do in EAP and links well to our recent training sessions. The use of SFL will also inform our approach to content development for Curriculum ‘26, so this study is clearly applicable to our practice.
Obviously all 29 pages of my published article are brilliantly written, but as you are busy people, I would recommend reading the Results and Discussion section as it illustrates how I selectively used aspects of SFL to analyse these texts. Transitivity analysis, for example, was useful in understanding how participants were framed (see Thompson, 2013). In the Mail, for example, anti-racism demonstrators appeared alongside multiple actants within conflict driven narratives, yet the specific identities of those perpetrating violent acts were unexplainedly obscured. Verb processes were also significant. For instance, in the Guardian and the BBC protesters “gathered in” places or “attended” demonstrations and were more likely to engage in a greater range of verbal and cognitive processes (e.g., “speak out”; “defy”). The Mail, however, predominantly attached protestors to the verb phrases “march on” and “march through” (e.g., “Demonstrators march through Leeds”), which contributed to a militarily based discourse and positioned them as external from the UK’s towns and cities (i.e., moving from out to in).
This data driven approach has clear connections to how we have been encouraged to use SFL and these other approaches when developing content and analysing texts. Speaking from experience, it is easy to be straight jacketed by methodologies, theories and frameworks but obviously it is important to remember that we are bringing something meaningful to the table, and these approaches should complement our existing knowledge and expertise.
While relevant to EAP, my research in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) may also resonate with those colleagues in the social sciences as its principal intent is to understand the origin of discourses and their role in shaping society and the power relations that exist therein. This paper, for example, focuses on the protest paradigm (see Kim & Shahin, 2020), and the impact of political and media elites on the coverage of social movements so I am sure it would be of interest to colleagues across the centre.
If you have time to read my article, I hope you can take something from it.
References
Kim, K. and Shahin, S., 2020. Ideological parallelism: Toward a transnational understanding of the protest paradigm. Social Movement Studies, 19(4), pp.391-407.
Searle, J.R., 1968. Austin on locutionary and illocutionary acts. The philosophical review, 77(4), pp.405-424.
Searle, J.R., 1976. A classification of illocutionary acts1. Language in society, 5(1), pp.1-23.
Thompson, G., 2013. Introducing functional grammar. Routledge.
Enjoyed reading this. Thank you very much Jagon. Heading to your article as I type…