In order to explore the differences in portraying Saudi women in the media of two different countries, the researcher conducted a small pilot study where a number of newspapers were analyzed. However, as the study is completed, the researcher finds that several issues need to be improved in the main study. While these problems do not diminish the value of the performed research, they need to be addressed further, so that the main research covers every possible aspect of the topic.
First of all, in the pilot study, the researcher covers data from a time span of one year, from 1112018 to 1112019. Therefore, the number of relevant to the subject newspapers is limited to four, two British and two Saudi newspapers. In the main study, the researcher is going to cover four years, from 112016 to 112020. The amount of the examined newspapers will also expand, the researcher plans to collect data from two left- and two right-wing British broadsheet newspapers, and four regional broadsheet Saudi newspapers.
Moreover, one of the essential elements of the study is also going to be reformed. In the pilot study, the student presents three research questions that cover rather broad topics. For example, one of the problems refers to ways that the Saudi and the UK press represent Saudi women. Moreover, the nature of the representation is also analyzed; the researcher studies whether newspapers of two countries portray Saudi women negatively or positively. Finally, the use of vocabulary is also examined; the student identifies differences in how the Saudi and the UK press employs language to portray Saudi women.
The main study is going to cover more narrow issues. For instance, the researcher will address the thematic foci related to Saudi women in the British corpus compared to the Saudi corpus. Furthermore, the analysis will include frequent topics or issues considered in news articles relating to Saudi women in both corpora. Finally, the differences in the use of modifiers in describing Saudi women by the Saudi press and the UK press will also be examined.
For the purpose of completing the analysis in the pilot study, the researcher compares SWBC and BNC (Davies, 2004-), SWSC and The Arabic Web 2012, including arTenTen12 (Batita and Zi Gui, 2017) and Stanford tagger. The analysis tools for the comparison includes keywords, concordance line analysis and the ten most frequent collocations with the term Saudi women. In the main study, the same corpora will be compared while using the same tools; however, the number of modifiers will be expanded from 10 to 100. Moreover, the student plans to apply a more in-depth CDA analysis.
Some limitations were found in the pilot study, which resulted in developing new aspects of the study, such as expanding the time span and changing the research question. First of all, in the pilot study, the student used only four newspapers from the period of one year, which cannot fully demonstrate the presentation of Saudi women in media. It is evident that in order to gather more samples of diverse information for the analysis, a bigger time period needs to be investigated. Moreover, a more in-depth CDA analysis is necessary, and some topics related to certain patterns about the representations of Saudi women need to be investigated further. Besides, the statistical significance of some of the results was not analyzed. Therefore, it is required to test them in the main study. In conclusion, the pilot study does not feature an effective critical discourse analysis; the aspects are too broad (the nature of the representation, the use of vocabulary). For this reason, the main study will contain more precise elements, like the analysis of the thematic foci and the use of modifiers. It will allow the researcher to gain more detailed knowledge on the topic.
References
- Batita, M. A., & Zi Gui, M. (2017). The enrichment of Arabic wordnet antonym relations. Proceedings of International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing. Springer, Cham, 342-353.
- Davies, M. (2004-) British National Corpus (from Oxford University Press). Web.