Style, structure and ideology in English and Vietnamese business hard news reporting : a comparative study.

The thesis is a comparative study of the stylistic, structural and ideological properties of English and Vietnamese business news reporting – specifically a study of the generic structure of English and Vietnamese business hard news stories, the journalistic voices and the underlying ideologies operating in these stories. Taking as its starting point the orbital model developed for the analysis of hard news reporting in English by Iedema at el. (1994) and White (1997, 1998), the study sought to investigate whether the English and Vietnamese business news reports are organized around the same orbital structure. Drawing on Appraisal Theory with the system of journalistic voices developed by Martin and White (2005) as an analytical tool, the study attempted to examine whether the same system of voices could be seen to operate in the business hard news reporting of the two languages. With regard to the exploration of ideologies embedded in these news stories, the study employed Critical Discourse Analysis as a main framework to shed light on the representation of key social groups – specifically the government, the central banks and the people in the two languages. The study employed a corpus of fifty business hard news stories (25 in each language) downloaded from The Australian and The Thời Báo Kinh Tế Việt Nam (Vietnam Economic Times) and subjected them to a close textual analysis in terms of generic structure and journalistic voices. For the examination of ideologies, a study of two texts sharing the same topic (the second stimulus package launched by the Australian and Vietnamese governments in their attempt to save the nations from the financial crisis) served as a preliminary study for a corpus analysis of the fifty texts mentioned above. The analysis focused on the representation of the key social groups by the transitivity system from an ideological perspective. It was conducted with the use of a concordancing programme as an analytical tool. The study shows that the English and Vietnamese business texts generally share the same organization – the orbital structure – and that these news stories basically operate with the same reporter voice – a stylistic arrangement in which the evaluative options available to the journalist author are severely curtailed, resulting in what is often described as an objective or institutional style. However, despite this broad similarity between the two languages, a number of more subtle differences were observed. With regard to the ideologies embedded in the two languages, the study suggests that the two languages significantly differ in the representation of the key social groups. The study makes contributions to the field of media analysis both theoretically and practically. It offers implications for teaching English for journalism at tertiary level in Vietnam – i.e teaching students how to effectively write a Vietnamese news report in English to meet the potential expectations of English readers.Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 201