Ideological Constructions in News Discourse Presented in Philippine Broadsheets: Input to Innovations in Language Education

Abstract

The study investigated the discursive nature of reportage in the news presented in leading Philippine broadsheets and established how purposive linguistic choices lead to biases that shape ideology. CDA was used as the study's operational framework, while SFL guided textual analysis, specifically on the system of transitivity for analyzing process types. The evaluative language was analyzed using the Appraisal Theory. The research involved 585 news articles, mining 231,985 words to form the corpus. The analysis revealed that news reportage's discursive nature is non-conventional in terms of passive agent deletion in headlines and the strategic use of evaluative language to forward ideologies. The news discourse used the material process type often and for particular socio-political personalities. The news stories were also found to have visibility bias the most, while the use of evaluative language was a source of bias in the discourse. Together with the framework developed as the study's output, these results serve as inputs for innovations in language education, especially in courses in communication, genre-based linguistics, and media studies. These provide oppositional and/or fresh perspectives in language teaching in the new normal, where careful and appropriate use of language is key in forwarding critical information to the public.