A Comparative Genre Analysis of English News Reports about the Russian- Ukrainian Crisis.

Abstract

Genre is a sociolinguistic approach that is used for some particular communicative purpose. It tends to be related more with the organisation of culture and social aims around language (Bhatia, 1993; Swales, 1990). Genre is also tied more firmly to concern of ideology and power. The current study links these two approaches in the analysis of the articles. The texts of newspapers work to build and shape the ideology of people. This study aims to analyse the structures of moves organisation of some selected articles written about the Russian- Ukrainian Crisis based on Bhatia (1993) model. The researcher chooses the Moscow Times from Russia and the Kyiv Post from Ukraine since these selected newspapers are written in English.  All the articles were written before the official declaration of war to show how the language of newspapers manipulates messages to deceive the public. The findings showed that all the  articles follow Bhatia’s model using the four moves during writing and giving more emphases to the headlines.

Keywords: genre, sociolinguistics, ideology, power, the Russia-Ukrainian crisis.