Investigating Saudi EFL Female University Students’ Command of Journalistic Writing: An SFL-based Study on Textual Organization

Abstract

This study examines written literacy outcomes among Saudi female university students undertaking an EFL journalistic course over fourteen weeks. It specifically aims to explore their competence in the English hard news genre. It, thus, seeks to address the following question: after completing the course, to what degree did students create texts structurally matching the conventional English news report? The significance of this study lies in its integration of media and education, employment of linguistic analysis based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, and use of English expert news reports for comparison with students’ journalistic texts. It deployed the genre-based pedagogy devised within the Sydney School to design the news writing course. Twenty-five students undertook such a course during the 2022 academic year. This study gathered those students’ writing to subject it to linguistic scrutiny, assessing each student over one news report after completing the course. It reports that, after the course, half of the class developed their ability to produce the genre of the standard English language hard news report. Those students created texts that matched the professional news articles in the corpus, thus effectively following the textual features of such a genre.