A Study On The Cohesion And Coherence Of English Broadcast News Texts

English broadcast news is a kind of important media in English-speaking countries because lots of people learn news about the world by listening to the radio and watching TV. This also makes it a very good way for people who learn English to practice their listening abilities. This paper will focus on the text of English broadcast news and make a study on the cohesion and coherence of it, which are two hot topics in text analysis.Text analysis is of a cross-disciplinary field and many disciplines could be connected with it and be used as approaches for it. This paper mainly applies the theories of sociolinguistics by William Labov on the structural components of spoken narratives which will give an explanation on the cohesion and coherence of English broadcast news texts in structure, and also the theories of systemic functional linguistics developed by M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan which will explain the cohesion and coherence across sentences of a broadcast news text. The former one is from the perspective of structure and the latter one is of sentence, which together makes a comparatively overall study of the cohesion and coherence of English broadcast news texts.By using the deductive and the inductive approaches and also the corpus-based approach, this paper will try to achieve the following three objectives: firstly, to explore the organization and structure of English broadcast news texts and also the intrinsic reasons why texts of this kind are organized in this way; secondly, to find out the characteristics of the cohesion and coherence of English broadcast news texts; thirdly, to make this research valuable to English teachers in finding a way to guide their students'listening activities.In order to make a quantitative analysis on different cohesive devices used in broadcast news texts, a Broadcast News Text Corpus (hereinafter referred to as BNTC) is designed and built. The texts in BNTC are taken randomly from the news texts of the most famous radio and TV stations in English-speaking countries, among which VOA,...