Social Media and Crisis Between the State and Secondary School Teachers in Cameroon: A Discourse Analysis of Telegram Messages and the Government Responses (Published)
This study explores teachers’ discourses on Telegram during the strike launched by the movement “Enough is enough” or “On a Trop Supporté” in its French version. Secondary school teachers have been subject to the state’s manipulations and procrastinations since 2000. Some of the government announcements bearing expressions such as “On the high instructions from the Head of State”, “we will gradually solve the problems of teachers”, “ teachers are the best paid civil servants in Cameroon” just to postpone what they would have done before. Since then, the state kept feeding them with promises that are hardly fulfilled. As a matter of fact, the state continued to give them empty promises about their salary and special status. The issue resulted in the strike which began on February 21st, 2022 and is still going on. This study aims at investigating the linguistic power of some expressions used by the government in order to keep teachers in their poor working conditions. In addition, it investigates the teachers’ reactions towards the government dishonesty. Fairclough (1992, 1993, and 1995) CDA model helped in the process of data analysis. Data for this study is made up of 150 Telegram messages collected from secondary school teachers nationwide. Analysis unveiled that the government’s messages leaned on the slovenliness of English language to dodge the teachers’ requests.
Citation: Nouhou P.Z.(2022) Social Media and Crisis Between the State and Secondary School Teachers in Cameroon: A Discourse Analysis of Telegram Messages and the Government Responses, British Journal of English Linguistics, Vol.10, Issue 5, pp.14-25
Keywords: CDA, Crisis, Government, OTS, Telegram messages, manipulative language
Ideology in News Reports: Al-Jazeera Reporters As Representative: A Critical Discourse Analysis (Published)
This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate the way reporters of Al-Jazeera English Satellite Channel use to covey events and actions during the Syrian crisis. The study aims to find out whether reporters are neutral in their coverage or they carry an ideology which accords with one of the warring parties of conflict. It also aims at finding out the ideological implications that reporters have in the news texts toward the parties of conflict in Syria. The study hypothesizes that news reporters of Al-Jazeera are not neutral, but rather they have a prejudiced and a one-sided ideology towards the conflicted parties. For the analysis of the data, the study follows Van Dijk’s (1998) model of ‘ideological square’. The analysis is limited to investigate some discourse features, among many others, for their importance and their abundance in the data under scrutiny. Finally, the study has come with some conclusions that validate the hypotheses.
Keywords: : Modality, CDA, Contrasts, Crisis, Ideology, Media, Topics, Transparency