An Analysis of Syntax and Academic Word Choice in Political News
Abstract
English newspapers contain discourses with a variety of language usage from
the real world. Therefore, English newspapers could be utilized as authentic materials
in an English study program or course to support English learning and teaching. This
study aimed to explore a deeper insight how English grammatical structures and
academic word choices used in an English newspaper, based on Systemic Functional
Grammar (SFG) by Michael Halliday and Academic Word List (AWL) by Averil
Coxhead.
The research results showed that the newspaper presented a variety of English
sentences used in spoken and written discourses in the context of articles. Complex
sentences were mostly utilized as a versatile writing technique. The academic words
were accounted for 7.69% of the total words in the 250 news articles, and the most
frequently presented words were “constitute” and “draft”. Some word families were
not found from the news articles; this might be due to some reasons that those words
were likely irrelevant to political affairs or situations in the period of study such as
“nuclear,” “medium,” or “series.”
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