Abstract
An English newspaper, as an authentic English resource, provides a view of global knowledge and English usage in a physical world as it contains manifold issues and discourses valuable for English teaching and learning in a contemporary classroom. This study employed Systemic Functional Grammar of Halliday’s approach to analyze texts of news linguistically. The purposes of the study were 1) to explore prevalent topics of AEC news as a reflection of Thailand and communicative purposes for the upcoming ASEAN Economic Community in 2015, 2) to specifically analyze grammatical sentence structures used in an English newspaper aiming for English teaching and learning in Thai context. AEC news’ articles were chosen for this study as it has become a considerably important event which shares multilateral information to ASEAN country members. The Nation newspaper was chosen for data collection for the period from January to August, 2013. Results showed that economics, tourism, and transportation were the most important topics and were reflective of Thailand’s movement towards AEC. The news was mostly organized the idea by particular to general technique and mainly conveyed to the readers with informing as a communicative purpose. The most prevalent sentence structures were complex sentence. Active voice was more prevalent than Passive voice. The conclusion of the study was drawn descriptively. This study implicated that an English newspaper was beneficial for English teaching and learning as it contained a variety of language usage that could be used as a teaching material to improve students’ grammatical and writing skills.
Keywords
- Systemic Functional Grammar Search this journal for Systemic Functional Grammar (opens in a new tab)
- AEC Search this journal for AEC (opens in a new tab)
- Authentic Material Search this journal for Authentic Material (opens in a new tab)
- Grammar Search this journal for Grammar (opens in a new tab)
- Writing Skill Search this journal for Writing Skill (opens in a new tab)
References
- Association of Southeast ASEAN Nations. (n.d.). ASEAN Economic Community. Retrieved March 25, 2014, from http://www.asean.org/communities/asean-economic-community
- Bloor, T. & Bloor M. (2004). The functional analysis of English: A Hallidayan Approach (2nd ed). London: Hodder Arnold.
- Brown P. C. (2002). The Newspaper: A Materials Writer’s Gold Mine. The Newsletter of the JALT Materials Writers SIG, 10(1), 2-9.
- Chavez, M. (1988). Learner's perspectives on authenticity. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching , 36(4), 277-306.
- Fahimeh, T. & Nabifar, N. (2013). A Comparative Study of Ideational Grammatical Metaphor in Health and Political Texts of English Newspapers. Journal of Academic and Applied Studies, 3(1), 32-51.
- Flairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. Great Britain: Edward Arnold.
- Guariento, W. & Morley, J. (2001).Text and task authenticity in the EFL classroom. ELT Journal, 55(4), 347-353.
- Halliday, M. A. K. (1994). Introduction to Functional Grammar (2nd ed). London: Edward Arnold.
- Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. (2004). An introduction to functional grammar (3rd ed.). London: Hodder Education.
- Laos and Thailand to have freight rail link by 2015. (2013). The Nation, Retrieved from http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/Laos-and-Thailand-to-have-freight-rail-link-by-20130199303.html
- Laos has until 2018 to cut tariffs for Afta. (2013). The Nation, Retrieved from http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/Laos-has-until-2018-to-cut-tariffs-for-Afta30197517.html
- Lavid, J., Arús, J. & Moratón, L. (2012). Genre Realized in Theme: The case of news reports and commentaries. Discours: Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique. Retrieved from http://discours.revues.org/8623. DOI: 10.4000/discours.8623.
- Manilerd, V. (1998). Print Media in ASEAN 1998, ASEAN Studies Publications Series. Phase I-c: Thailand: Asean Committee on Culture and Information.
- McCabe, A. & Heilman, K. (2007). Textual and interpersonal differences between a news report and an editorial. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses . 20 , 139-156.
- McDonough, J. & Shaw, C. (1993). Materials and methods in ELT. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Mekong river murderers to be executed in China today. (2013). The Nation, Retrieved from http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/Mekong-river-murderers-to-be-executed-in-China-tod30200973.html
- More VN tourists choose Thailand. (2013). The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.nationmultimedia.com/aec/More-VN-tourists-choose-Thailand-30197215.html
- Pokasamrit, P. (2009). A Sociolinguistic and Pragmatic analysis of the letters to the editor in the Post Bag column of the Bangkok Post. NIDA Development Journal, 49(3), 187-220.
- Richard, J. C. (2001). Curriculum development in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Rogers, C. V. & Medley, F. W., Jr. (1988). Language with a purpose: Using authentic materials in the foreign language classroom. Foreign Language Annals, 21, 467-478.
- Sanderson, P. (1999): Using Newspapers in the Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Van-Dijk, T. A. (1977). Text and Context: Explorations in the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. London: Longman.
- Van-DijK, T. A. (1988). News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Werlich, E. (1976). A text grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.
- Widdowson, H. (1990). Aspects of Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Downloads
No downloads have been recorded for this article yet. Figures appear here once readers begin downloading the full text.
How to Cite
Share this article
License
Copyright (c) 2014 Praochompoo Kumsorn (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Author (s) should affirm that the material has not been published previously. It has not been submitted and it is not under consideration by any other journal. At the same time author (s) need to execute a publication permission agreement to assume the responsibility of the submitted content and any omissions and errors therein. After submission of revised paper in the light of suggestions of the reviewers, the editorial team edits and formats manuscripts to bring uniformity and standardization in published material.
This work will be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) and under condition of the license, users are free to read, copy, remix, transform, redistribute, download, print, search or link to the full texts of articles and even build upon their work as long as they credit the author for the original work. Moreover, as per journal policy author (s) hold and retain copyrights without any restrictions.
Keywords
- Systemic Functional Grammar Search this journal for Systemic Functional Grammar (opens in a new tab)
- AEC Search this journal for AEC (opens in a new tab)
- Authentic Material Search this journal for Authentic Material (opens in a new tab)
- Grammar Search this journal for Grammar (opens in a new tab)
- Writing Skill Search this journal for Writing Skill (opens in a new tab)
Section
Published in
Vol. 5 No. 2 (2014)
Mobile Learning, Collaboration & Student Adjustment
View issue contents
Published
Submissions
Have research to publish? Journal of Education and Vocational Research welcomes submissions.
Make a Submission