Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Advanced Research in Education, Teaching and Learning
Year: 2021
DOI:
Exploring English Syntactic Structures and Tenses in Online International News
Wadinlada Thuratham, Austtasit Chainarong, PhD
ABSTRACT:
This study aimed at 1) studying the quantities of types of English sentence structures and 2) analyzing the English tenses used in the leads of online international news. The research used a purposive sampling by collecting the data from Reuters in the form of online publication. The genre of news was sports which covered 7 categories: athletics, cricket, cycling, golf, motor sports, soccer and tennis. The news has been posted on the Reuters’ website during 1st -7th September 2021 with 123 news in total. The only part of the news that was used to analyze was the leads based on the basic four types of English sentence structures and tenses written by George Yule (2009). The statistics used to summarize the data consisted of frequencies and percentages. The findings of this study revealed that complex sentence was the type of sentence structures that was mostly used in the leads with 82 sentences (66.67%), followed by simple sentence with 23 sentences (18.70%), compound-complex sentence with 13 sentences (10.57%), and compound sentence with 5 sentences (4.06%) respectively. Moreover, the 7 types of English tenses were used in the leads including past simple, past progressive, past perfect, present simple, present perfect, present perfect progressive and future simple. The passive forms and modal verbs were also written in the sentences. Thus, the results of this study would be useful for EFL students to learn how to report the news in English, especially in the lead part, for their future development of writing skills.
keywords: leads, sport news, sentence structures, verb tenses.