Text Analysis and Headline Proposal

There are THREE TASKS below to do for this assessment. For Tasks 2 and 3, refer to the BBC news story attached in the APPENDIX below when doing these two tasks.

Task 1: Derive ONE Semantic Macrostructure from each of the given texts.

(a) Indonesia's president has asked for international assistance to put out forest fires that have sent a thick haze over the region. After refusing offers of help from Singapore, Joko Widodo said he had now accepted. He said he also wanted help from Russia, Malaysia and Japan. The forest fires are the result of annual slash-and-burn practices by companies clearing land for palm oil and pulp wood plantations. They are burning mainly on Sumatra island and Indonesia's part of Borneo island, known as Kalimantan, both above ground and underneath the peat-rich soil. (BBC, 8 October 2015)

(b) Fifa has provisionally suspended its president Sepp Blatter, secretary general Jerome Valcke and vice-president Michel Platini for 90 days. Former Fifa vice-president Chung Mong-joon has been banned for six years and fined 100,000 Swiss Francs (£67,000). The punishments were handed out by the ethics committee of football's world governing body. Blatter, Valcke and Uefa president Platini are being investigated by the committee over corruption allegations. "The grounds for these decisions are the investigations that are being carried out by the investigatory chamber of the ethics committee," it said in a statement. The three are banned from any football activity in the interim. They deny any wrongdoing. (BBC, 8 October 2015)

(c) A Swedish study of five million people appears to support the theory that height and cancer risk are linked. The study found that taller people had a slightly higher risk of breast cancer and skin cancer, among other cancers. Its results found that for every extra 10cm (4in) of height, when fully grown, the risk of developing cancer increased by 18% in women and 11% in men. But experts said the study did not take into account many risk factors and that tall people should not be worried. To reduce risk of cancer, the most important things to do are: 

· give up smoking

· cut down on alcohol

· adopt a healthy diet and lifestyle

Previous studies have shown a link between height and an increased risk of developing cancer, although why it exists is not known. (BBC, 2 October 2015)

(d) So-called Islamic State group (IS) has shifted its propaganda distribution to the secure mobile messaging app Telegram from Twitter, where its accounts have been repeatedly shut down over the past year. IS and other jihadist groups appear to be exploiting new functionality introduced by the app last month, which allows users to broadcast their messages to an unlimited number of members via their own Telegram "channel". On 26 September, just four days after Telegram trumpeted the launch of its new "Channels" tool, IS media operatives on Twitter started advertising the group's own channel dubbed Nashir, which translates as "Distributor" in English. It has already amassed more than 4,500 subscribers. Since then, IS propaganda has started appearing first via Telegram, often several minutes before being posted to Twitter. (Source: BBC, 7 October 2015)   

Task 2: Propose a headline for the news story below and provide a reason for the constructed headline.

Task 3: Analyse the news story lexically (word choice) and ideologically