Teaching EFL on the radio: a genre-based study of language use in English teaching radio programmes in Taiwan

Abstract

This thesis provides a genre-based study of the ways in which language is used in English teaching radio programmes (ETRPs) in Taiwan. Drawing upon the frameworks of genre analysis, pragmatics, systemic linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, the ethnography of communication, and variation analysis, and research on classroom discourse and media discourse, ETRPs are studied as a genre by examining the relationship between context, communicative purposes, discourse structure and lexical-grammatical use. Nineteen days of ETRPs of different broadcasts, which were on air in 1998-2001 and which served senior high school students in Taiwan, were recorded, transcribed and coded for linguistic analyses. The pedagogical purposes of ETRPs are identified by investigating the educational needs of the listeners and the stated aims of the broadcasters. They are then studied in more detail by considering the communicative needs generated in the situational context. The purposes of ETRPs provide frameworks for the description and explanation - quantitative and qualitative - of the prominent genre features, above and below the level of sentence, of ETRPs. The accounts of the discourse structure of ETRPs include not only the generic structure (the macrostructure) but also the interaction structure of the genre; i.e. the interaction between the presenters in the generic structure of a monologue. This thesis also makes comparisons between various broadcasts of ETRPs and interprets listeners' perceptions of ETRPs in terms oftheir genre features. It concludes by considering applications ofthe findings to the fields of genre analysis and language teaching.