A Genre Analysis Of English Political News Based On Three English Newspapers

English political news has aroused great concern in the field of linguistics in recent years. On the one hand, people in the world are more interested in Political News (PN for short) as the international communications and trades are closely related to political policies in every country, and political news might be directing power for the investment that deals with the benefits of every one. On the other hand, the nature of news is far from neutrally reflecting social reality and empirical facts, intervenes in what is so called"the social construction of reality". Political Orientation (PO for short) in PN can slant people'opinions to what it favors and control people's mind unconsciously. For that reason, it's necessary for people to read PN with great care. Detecting PO is also very important when one reads English political news.The present study aims to find out the move structure of PN by analyzing the common points in the corpus of China Daily (C for short), Guardians (G for short) and New York Times (N for short). Political orientations (POs for short) are also explored in these three English newspapers. Three methods were utilized to conduct the research. (1) Swales'(1990) terms of'move'and'step'in CARS model were borrowed to provide basic generic analysis method for PN. (2) Bhatia's (1993) cognitive structure of news provided an original mode for the research of move structure of PN, because the genre of PN is indeed a sub-genre of news. (3) Transitivity as a critical tool was used in the explanations of Move One and Move Two in order to detect the POs in C, N and G. The results revealed that the move structure of PN consists of five moves. Except Move Four---recommending the action was an optional move, the other four moves were obligatory. Compared with Bhatia's cognitive structure of news, PN had one new move--- introducing the background information, which was very crucial to convince readers.C usually stands at a relatively objective stance, while G and N are quite different, appearing subjective in some PN because the governments'attitudes they represent are quite different towards international affairs. What's more, G and N convey the ideas that US and UK are the justice of the world, other countries, especially developing countries are considered to be full of misery, dissidents, unsteady situations in their eyes.This study recommends a move structure of English political news, which helps readers understand how each move is realized by steps in PN and also remind readers of the infiltration of western ideologies in reading English political news.