IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tec/journl/v17y2021i1p524-537.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

EFL Students' Difficulties with Lexical and Syntactic Features of News Headlines and News Stories

Author

Listed:
  • Reima Al-Jarf

    (King Saud University, Saudi Arabia)

Abstract

Sixty-eight undergraduate translation students received direct instruction in the features of news headlines and news stories. A week later, they took a test that required them to identify the syntactic and lexical features of a sample of news headlines and news stories, supply deleted word, and substitute punctuation marks, infinitives, and block language by their meanings. Results showed that 75% of the subjects could identify initials, 72% recognized surnames and infinitives used instead of the ‘future', 51% recognized deleted articles, 49% identified block language, 21% identified passive without agent, 19% recognized instances were verb “to be†was deleted, and 6% identified ellipted words. Incorrect responses revealed syntactic and semantic/lexical problems, lack of knowledge of current world events, and insufficient ability to apply features of newspaper language to news headlines and news stories unseen before. To help students read and comprehend news headlines and news stories, pedagogical implications are given.

Suggested Citation

  • Reima Al-Jarf, 2021. "EFL Students' Difficulties with Lexical and Syntactic Features of News Headlines and News Stories," Technium Social Sciences Journal, Technium Science, vol. 17(1), pages 524-537, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:tec:journl:v:17:y:2021:i:1:p:524-537
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://techniumscience.com/index.php/socialsciences/article/view/2780/1075
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://techniumscience.com/index.php/socialsciences/article/view/2780
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    News Headlines; News Stories; Newspaper Language; Media Reports; Lexical Features; Syntactic Features; Media Texts; Processing Problems; stylistic features.;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R00 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General - - - General
    • Z0 - Other Special Topics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tec:journl:v:17:y:2021:i:1:p:524-537. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Tasente Tanase (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.