ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics - Volume 123, Issue 1, 1999

This study examines the linguistic structures and processes through which news reports about a political issue in South Korea serve to propagate specific ideologies. Critical linguistic analysis is used as the theoretical and analytical framework to examine news reports about the North Korean nuclear threat to South Korea in the New York Times and the Korea Herald. Through a comparative analysis of two newspapers, it illustrates how the linguistic structures and processes in news discourse combine to produce particular meanings which construct ideological representations of social reality by establishing an 'us vs. them' dichotomy from their own particular ideological position. This study makes two contributions. First, it contributes to the development of a theoretical and methodological framework which is capable of revealing the ideological underpinning of news texts. Second, this study demonstrates the ideological role of language within news discourse as an apparatus for molding attitudes and value-systems in readers. This study has an implication for teaching language awareness of the constructive and functional nature of language in general and news discourse in particular in and out of a school setting, (key words : critical linguistic analysis, language awareness, language and ideology, naturalization, propagation)

Fail to belongs to a type of verbal structures which are in a syntactic construction with other verbs (e.g. fail to win) and which have meanings related to aspect or modality. In this paper we used the COBUILD corpus to analyse the discursive function of fail to and the meaning it adds to the verbal group where it occurs. The paper shows that with regard to function fail to is more similar to auxiliaries than to lexical verbs. Fail to is used in positive clauses to deny an expectation, which explains its association with non-durative aspect and with the modality meanings "non-achievement" and "unfulfilled obligation", and in rhetorical questions and negative clauses it is used to express the speaker's strong commitment to the certainty of a proposition.

This paper reports on an empirical examination of the effect of instructors' formal training, professional experience, culturo-linguistic background, and exposure to the local context on the evaluation of EFL composition. A total of 106 English-native and Arabic-native instructors, with varying academic training, teaching experience, and exposure to the local context of EFL instruction, evaluated the language, the contents, and the rhetorical structures of two EFL compositions - written by Arabic-native speakers - using 10-point scales.

Findings show that instructor's culturo-linguistic background was evidently the most influential factor on the evaluation of EFL composition. Instructor 's exposure to the local Arabic context of EFL instruction testified to confirm this effect.

With respect to the effect of instructor's teaching experience on the evaluation of EFL composition, the findings reveal that expe-rienced instructors appear to be more rigid in their evaluation of EFL composition than their less experienced counterparts. The effect of instructor's formal training on the evaluation of EFL composition is generally inconsistent.