Schematic Approach To Broadcast News Stories

The author has collected 300 pieces of VOA hard news in standard English from Internet and VOA in standard English listening courses. Based on schema theory, this thesis attempts to illustrate the schemata of these broadcast news stories. According to schema theory, a learner's background knowledge of a text is stored in his/her brain in the form of formal schemata (background knowledge of the formal, rhetorical organizational structures of different types of texts) and content schemata (background knowledge of the content area of a text). Formal and content schemata help learners to comprehend a text in a cognitive way. Schemata are important not just in interpreting information, but also in decoding how that information is presented. Schemata can be reflected in the formal structure and content structure of a text. This thesis aims to discover the formal and content schemata of broadcast news stories.The analysis of formal schemata of broadcast news stories is based on van Dijk' news schema and Allan Bell's discourse structure for news texts, In the research we find that (1)the formal schemata of broadcast news stories delivered by anchor and reporter has two macro-components: lead-in and body. The lead-in shows the anchor-audience relationship and the body indicates the reporter-audience relationship. The Lead-in consists of two subcomponents: lead and delegation. The body has four subcomponents: episode, background, commentary and ending. The background comprises micro-components of previous events and history; The episode includes main events and follow-up and the follow-up contains verbal reaction, and consequences; The commentary includes two micro-components of evaluation and expectation; in the subcomponent of ending, the reporter has the last word, followed by her or his name and the station identification. (2)The broadcast news story delivered byanchor has two macro-components: lead and body. The lead gives the key information of the news story and the body gives details. The body has three subcomponents: background, episode, and commentary. The episode includes main event(s) and follow-up. The follow-up contains verbal reaction, andconsequences (subsequent events). The background comprises micro-components of previous event(s), and history. And the commentary includes evaluation and expectation. All these components may be regarded as slots of formal schemata of broadcast news stories. Formal schemata indicate the cognitively regular patterns of organizations of broadcast news stories.The thesis illustrates the content schemata of accidents, crimes and protest stories for broadcasting. The content schema for accident stories comprises 10 content elements: Location, Casualty, Time, Cause, Scene, Rescue and relief, Eyewitness, Victim, Background, Investigation for responsibility, etc. The content schema of the terrorism stories comprises 11 elements: Location, Casualty, Time, Background, Eyewitness, Scene, Rescue and relief, Responsibility claim, Official response, Victim, Perspective, etc. The content schema for protest stories comprises 10 elements: Protestors, Protestors scale, Reasons to protest, Location, Time, Scene, Protestors' demand, Clashes, Casualty and arrest, Background, etc. We find that they have some similar and different elements. These content elements can be put in the slots of formal schemata. The news stories may not contain all content elements and some of the elements are missing, as they are common knowledge to listeners. The choice of the content elements seems to be flexible.