Genre Analysis Of Students’ English Hard News Story Writing In A Thai EFL University Context
Abstract
The generic structures of students’ hard news stories were analysed in an English for Journalism course. The course lecturer used some material on hard news and feature stories to teach students how to write such stories. More specially, this study focused on the genre analysis of some hard news stories written by 154 students participating in the project. The detailed analysis of the generic structures was based on three selected student texts with one from each of high, mid and low levels. The analysis was based on hard news generic structures identified in a systemic functional linguistics framework. The findings indicated that all samples wrote their own hard news stories effectively to varying degrees. They could construct texts that mostly conformed to the typical generic structures identified in the literature. It was also found that they could use language structures such as clause complexity effectively on average but some structures still needed further developments. In addition, other language structure developments were needed for all groups of students so they could write more interesting, compelling and complete stories. Therefore, a recommended action is frequent writing practices for students and applications of local and world current news stories to be integrated into the syllabus to further develop students’ writing proficiency and news repertoire. In future courses, there should be greater integration of training and modelling on the teaching and learning cycle, resources of appraisal framework and the metafunctions of systemic functional linguistics; experiential, interpersonal and textual functions.
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