• Fahd Mohammed Sagheer Eid

  Author

The controversial Al Jazeera Channel, which is considered as one of the news giants
around the globe, raises a lot of queries regarding its news cast, news coverage and its
debatable programs. Beside news channels, Al Jazeera also has its own news websites that add
to its coverage of news. The news websites offer free access to its contents. Al Jazeera has two
main websites that present news in Arabic and English languages. Therefore, I would like to
compare the news that are provided in the Arabic website with same news in the English version.
The two websites are directed to different audience totally culturally and ideologically.
(Fowler,1991) stresses that “News-making is a practice that influences the social construction of
reality”.
This paper employs Systemic Functional Grammar of Halliday’s approach to analyze texts of
news websites linguistically. Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) focuses on how language is
used to express meaning. Because Systemic Grammar is concerned with meaning and how the
language is used in context, it is used as a powerful popular tool to investigate how linguistic
items and grammatical patterns are used to express different semantic issues. The researcher
will analyze lexicogrammatical system that is presented on both websites. The methods will be
analytical and descriptive.
The main data will be some Arabic headlines and their English equivalents in addition to two
news articles in both languages. They will be collected from http://www.aljazeera.com/ and
http://www.aljazeera.net/portal. This paper aims at uncovering the differences in both Arabic
and English websites of Al Jazeera.net showing the language choice and lexicogrammatical
representation of news.

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