A Critical Analysis Of The News Reports On Huangyan Island Incident From Chinese And American Newspapers Based On SFG

Nowadays news plays a very important role in our daily life. The21stcentury iscalled the age of information or computer age. Newspapers play a critical role in themodern society to feed information about politics, business and technologicaladvancement. Newspapers supply the public the latest news and keep it informed aboutcurrent happenings, incidents and changes of events in the world. When the HuangyanIsland Incident broke out, the people of the world are able to quickly know about it onthe air and newspapers. However, it is not necessarily that people know the truthbecause of the hidden ideology within the news.Today newspapers produced in a country are no longer limited to the nativelanguage; instead, newspapers in foreign languages, especially in English, are alsoissued worldwide. Among several English newspapers issued in China, China Dailyplays the most essential role. Meanwhile, because the American media is the mostpowerful in the international communication, its international reports have a greateffect on other nations’ images in the world. And among so many newspaperspublished in America, New York Times and Washington Post are the most influentialones. Therefore, a comparative analysis of the news on Huangyan Island from theseChinese and American news reports is conducted in this paper to explore the ideologybehind them.This study comprises of five parts. Chapter one deals about the brief introduction,background and context of the study along with nature of news, purpose, significance,limitation and statement problem of the study. Chapter two deals about the review ofthe previous studies on news discourse and critical analysis both at home and abroad inrelation to the purpose of study. Chapter three deals about research methodology ofhow the study was conducted, such as method of data collection, organization andanalysis to explain, describe, interpret and eventually to report the result. Chapter fourdeals about data transcription, explanation, description and analysis both qualitativelyand quantitatively. Chapter five arrives at a conclusion, implications, limitations andsuggestions of the future study.This dissertation adopts Fairclough’s CDA as its research framework and SFG asits analytical instrument, because they have a close relationship with each other andshare similar views about language. The researcher revealed the underlying motives of newspapers behind the hidden ideologies by exploring the similarities and differencesbetween them in terms of transitivity and modality. In addition, some specificsuggestions are proposed to the development of critical discourse analysis, theimprovement of news English teaching and the cultivation of English learners’ criticallanguage awareness and critical reading ability. Traditional news English teachingmainly focuses on the explanation of linguistic features of news discourse, such asvocabulary, grammar, syntax and rhetoric, and less importance is attached to theexploration of social and ideological factors hidden in news discourse. It is pointed outthat explanation of the linguistic features should be combined with the exploration ofthe discourse practice and social practice to uncover the invisible ideology concealed inthe news language. More importance should be attached to the cultivation of criticallanguage awareness of the English learners, so they cannot be controlled and misled bynews language which seems objective and neutral.