A Critical Discourse Analysis of Reports on “Bring Back our Girls” Campaign in Nigerian Newspapers

• Authors: Bashir Abdullahi Saleh , Ahmed Umar

Abstracts

EN

This paper analyses news reports of “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign in Nigerian newspapers. The “Bring Back Our Girls” advocacy group was formed to pressure the Nigerian government to intensify efforts to rescue the over two hundred school girls abducted by Boko Haram insurgents at Chibok, Borno State, north east Nigeria. The abduction which took place in April 2014 and the subsequent campaign to release the girls received global media attention including many newspapers in the country. The study therefore analyses the schematic directions, discursive strategies and context of the discourse reports of “Bring Back Our Girls” campaigns in Nigerian newspapers using critical discourse analysis. The corpus was purposively selected from three nationally circulating newspapers: Leadership, New Telegraph and Daily Trust published from1st May to 31st July, 2014. Descriptive design was adopted using Fairclough (1995) model of critical discourse analysis. Findings show that narration and criticism constitute the dominant schematic directions of newspaper reports of the campaign; on the discursive strategy, it is found out that rationalization, narrativisation and argumentation account for 80% of the discourse and the context revealed that there is negative use of language because the campaigners and the then government of the day were loggerheads over the issue. The study concludes that due to high prevalence of criticism and rationalization in the corpus, the discourse the text of newspaper report of Bring Back Our Girls campaign largely reflected the narrative and argument of the group against the government which has responsibility to protect and rescue the abducted girls.

Keywords

EN

Campaign; Critical Discourse Analysis; Boko Haram; Nigeria

• Publisher: Akademia Pedagogiki Specjalnej. Language and Society Research Committee
• Journal: Language, Discourse & Society
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 215-237
• Document type: Original Article

Dates

published

2019-06-30

Contributors

author

Bashir Abdullahi Saleh

• Modibbo Adama University, Yola

author

Ahmed Umar

• Adamawa State Post-Primary Schools Management Board, Yola

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Notes

EN