A genre analysis of the introduction sections of sports news presentation on selected Ghanaian television stations

Abstract

The study aimed to present a genre analysis of the introduction sections of sports news presentation programmes (SNPP) on selected television stations in Ghana. Specifically, the study sought to account for the schematic structure (that is the various rhetorical units, the sequence of moves, the textual space of each move identified) and some lexico-grammatical resources that are dominant in the selected rhetorical unit that was analyzed. Three television stations (GTV, Metro TV & TV3) were selected. The total number of data set comprised 50 transcribed episodes of the SNPP from the three television stations. The analysis of the data set was done by drawing on the perspective of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). Aside this, the study employed the AntConc software to account for some keywords and their collocates as evident in the data set. The findings revealed that the introduction section of the SNPP of the three stations analyzed is characterized by six-move rhetorical structure. With respect to the language use, it was identified that majority of the keywords found in the introduction section consisted of what Scott (1999) calls the ‘aboutness’ variety which include words that tell us about the genre of the corpus. The findings of this research have pedagogical implication as well as having implication for the genre theory.