A text analysis of Arab news headlines relating to education and learning

Abstract EN

The manner in which language is utilized to represent social issues in the public space such as in the print media can have far-reaching implications, not only on the issues being reported but also on the characters around those issues.

One of the social issues often reported in the media is education and the process of its reportage including the linguistic formations of the headlines, which serves as signposts to a news item, are not always value-free.

They are sometimes laden with interests and ideological flavors.

Here, we take a descriptive mini critical approach to analyze education related headlines obtained from Arab News between 2011 and 2016 to account for interests and ideological connections to the various choices made.

The concepts of Appraisal and Theme-Rheme, offshoots of interpersonal, textual metafunctions of language, Systemic Functional Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, discourse ideology are employed.

The paper argues that news headlines are built on certain assumptions which are drawn upon from the society, and then reinforced to the target readers through what is known as lexical priming.

Also, positive evaluative language used in constructing the headlines are largely uncritical of the status quo and are rather meant to support and motivate the stakeholders