A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Newspaper Sports Hard News On China Daily And The Guardian

According to Swales'and Bhatia's concepts of genre, sports hard news, with its specific communicative purpose, can be defined as a sub-genre of sports news in general. Newspaper sports hard news (hereinafter NSHN), as one of the most popular and important media of information spreading and entertainment, plays a significant role in people's daily life. With its standard language and exact expressions about the language use in practice, sports news provides an ideal, accessible and effective source for the English learners to acquire the latest vocabulary and expressions. It is of extremely great significance for people who aim to improve their English proficiency and keep well-informed about the latest sports events by reading newspaper to have a good knowledge of the move structure of it. Most of the previous studies on sport news were conducted from the stylistic perspective, while few of them were taken under the genre theory which has been repeatedly proved as an effective tool to discourse analysis.Based on the four-move structure of news discourse proposed by Bhatia (1993), the present thesis conducts a comparative genre analysis on sports hard news from China Daily and The Guardian. 20 pieces of sports hard news about the same ten football matches of 2010 South Africa World Cup are selected from China Daily and The Guardian as the corpus of the present study. This study conducts a move structure analysis on NSHN of both China Daily and The Guardian, on which a comparative analysis on the similarities and differences of moves and their occurrence are undertaken; meanwhile, it makes an attempt to explore the reasons for the differences from the perspective of football culture and rhetorical patterns between China and Britain.The finding shows that the move structure of NSHN of China Daily and The Guardian shares partial similarities, but differences are obvious. There are overall fours moves (Move 1:"Presenting the case", Move 2:"Arguing the match", Move 3:"Explicating the match''and Move 4:"Sensationalizing the reader") in the NSHN of China Daily, while only two moves (Move 1:"Presenting the match"and Move 2:"Arguing the match") are identified in The Guardian. The comparative analysis indicates that China Daily and The Guardian share two common moves: Move 1 and Move 2. However, Move 2 of The Guardian is actually the combination of Move 2 and Move 3 of China Daily. Move 4 of China Daily, which can not be found in The Guardian, is the biggest differences between these two newspapers. Through the finding, a conclusion can be drawn that the move structure of NSHN varies within different social and cultural contexts.The present study identifies the move structure of NSHN of both China Daily and The Guardian, which enriches Bhatia's news discourse move-model and thus extends and deepens the application of genre theory. A comparative analysis on the NSHN in real context of language in use within two different cultures would facilitate people to improve their awareness of different social practices and cultures while constructing this type of text, and thus improve the appropriateness of language use to successfully fulfill the ultimate communicative purpose. Hopefully, it can guide the English teaching and learning for the Chinese English learners.