Learning language through watching and analyzing TV news programs



Learning language through watching news programs gives an opportunity not only to acquire listening comprehensions but also to make sense learning English in the context (situation) one can actually use. Language is about making sense of real life issues, so you’ll never run out of fresh content, which you can constantly use to build upon your vocabulary. But there is a specific language of broadcast news that can require philologists the particular skills. Here are peculiarities below that can be observed.

Television news writing tends to keep sentences short and simple, as long sentences written for the eye, for example, in newspapers do not work, when pieces of writings appear to be targeted to the audience that perceives the information through their ears. In order to better delay the message of news and avoid misunderstandings, television journalism has been developing the most optimized and appropriate ways of writing and formulating the news content.

According to our observations and analysis of series of news writing expertise, following general requirements exist and they help news journalists follow KISS — Keep It Short and Simple tendency.

Morphology and syntax of the sentences used in news stories are interrelated to the lexicology of the story itself. Eventually, all these three grammatical contexts that we will be analyzing news stories in the next paragraphs will result into a common platform for the media impact and maintains the audience perception features. When the style of a news product sounds in the way that is easy, familiar to perceive and pleasant to the ear, acknowledgements should go to those who create this style and regulate the linguistics of sentences in the story and stories in the program. Let us look through, the first, morphology, then the syntax and finally the lexicology of news stories on Euronews and Poytakht News with the instrumentality of a content analysis. Morphology of a news story can identify whether it is dynamic or static and biased or unbiased. According to text linguists, the more verbs in the text, the more dynamic the storytelling is; and the more adjectives there are, the less unbiased the coverage is. The analysis on the Euronews’ three random stories have shown the following results:

News stories can contain nouns of average 26 % of whole story’s text. The percentage of verbs used equals to average 11 %, while only 3,5 % of one story’s text can contain adjectives or participles.

To keep the stories unbiased and to be impartial in covering the news, news journalists tend to be careful with the adjectives they are using. Our analysis showed that all of the adjectives used in scrutinized stories were neutral ones.

The interview we have taken from broadcast journalism specialists in the United States has shown that some of the stories have promotional character, thus they are delivered as reportages. The proportion of adjectives, adverbs and participles exceed to some extent, comparing to news coverage on Euronews.

In terms of syntax of a news text, the point about the strict word order followed in news stories should be mentioned. As mentioned in previous chapter, there is a S-V-O (Subject-Verb-Object) or S-P-O (Subject-Predicate-Object) rule in English language. Sentences come with this order and it helps audience comprehend the information successfully.

While Euronews, with both native and non-native English-language news writers in its newsroom, strictly follows the rule, Potyakht News fails to keep track of the language standards, which may cause worse audience perception and media impact.

Here come the examples:

News program from December 10, 2016–0:04:30

There was held a scientific-practical conference, organized by the Healthcare Ministry and Medical Academy.

“Scientific-practical” is not grammatically correct, as these two words should not be hyphenated, but separated, or written as “scientific and practical”. It is a word-for-word translation of Russian «научно-практический» or Uzbek “ilmiy-amaliy”

“Scientific-practical conference” is a subject, but it is coming at the end of a sentence and “was held” as a predicate coming before the subject. In English, there are not such formula as “There was [verb]ed”. It is a word-for-word translation of «состоялся конференция».

The sentence is tautologized: There was held a conference, organized by Health Ministry.

News program from November23, 2016–0:07:27

Speakers at the opening ceremony noted that in our country is carried out an extensive work, not only on the development of light industry and textile, deeper study and fuller satisfaction of consumer demand for high quality clothes, but also on the improvement of aesthetic taste and dress-up skills of population, as well.

The sentence is too long for TV broadcast copy. Speakers at the opening ceremony noted that in our country is carried out an extensive work… “An extensive work”, which is subject, is coming at the end of the clause before the predicate and the adverbial phrase.

When it comes to speaking about what news reporting lexicon should include, one can address a thoroughly developed news-writing manual by Brian Richardson. In the manual, he says:

“Good broadcast writers use words that can capture an audience and create understanding the first time. A broadcast audience does not have the option of re-reading a sentence that was hard to follow. Good broadcast writers know someone has to read what they wrote aloud, on the air. They avoid most multiple-syllable words, words that are tough to pronounce, and long, convoluted sentences.”[5]

There is another angle, where we can have a look at word choice from. This is the assurance of bias and accuracy in news writing.

“Word choice is a key tool reporters use to subtly convey bias. Media consumers must be aware of this in order to protect themselves from bias quietly injected in the news”, Allie Duzett writes in her article on aim.org — Accuracy in Media website.

The word choice issue is very challenging in the newsrooms, where non-native speakers of English write English texts for news. The possibility of translating the word directly from the mother tongue to English can cause some problems, regarding better comprehension and perception. Furthermore, names of laws, documents, events and others are given in a “press-release style” with the context of strict political or administrative discourse.

So, ultimately it should be mentioned, the research lets us accent on personnel development for English-language news writing and broadcasting, that addresses the training and retraining of journalists, editors and linguists in Uzbekistan. Learning subtle nuances in term of lingo-stylistic peculiarities of broadcast news gives opportunity to linguists and philologists analyzing, criticizing so that news programs could get improved.

References:

1. Block, Mervin. Writing Broadcast News: A Professional Handbook. Chicago: Bonus Books, 2014.

2. Deryabin, Andrey. Television news as a communicative event. Kiev: Diskurs, 1998.

3. Fang, Irving. Writing Style Differences in Newspaper, Radio, and Television News — Minnesota, 2005.

4. Duzzet, Allie. Media Bias in Strategic Word Choice. 2011 http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/media-bias-in-strategic-word-choice/

5. Richardson, Brian. The Process of Writing News. https://processofwritingnews.wordpress.com/