A Comparative Study Of International News Reports In China Daily And The Guardian

Since newspaper language is dynamic and ever-changing and it possesses some distinctive features, it is a good way for English learners to read newspapers to enrich their language and culture knowledge of the target language and to keep up with the latest development of the language.English newspapers are published in many countries nowadays. But are those news reports composed by native speakers the same as those written by speakers of English as second language (ESL) or English as foreign language (EFL)? Thus two newspapers - China Daily (published in China and is looked on as written by ESL/EFL learners) and The Guardian (published in the United Kingdom and written by native speakers) -are selected. And the present thesis has been conducted to compare the stylistic features of the two newspapers. The news materials are all collected from the official websites of the two newspapers and two news corpora (each about 100,000 words) are built. Then with the help of computational and statistical methods, the stylistic features of the two news corpora are compared on four levels: graphological, lexical, syntactical and textual level. Many similarities as well as some differences have been perceived.The practical significance of this study is to indicate the similarities and differences between the English news reports in Chinese newspapers and those in British ones. And bearing the similarities and differences and their causes in mind, ESL/EFL learners might be more efficient in their language learning and acquisition in the future.