AAA Arbeiten aus Anglistikund AmerikanistikBand 33 (2008)Heft 2Gunter Narr Verlag TbingenThe English of Broadcast News:When English is Not the First Languageof the AudienceHamish NorbrookThis paper will look at some of the issues surrounding the English of broad-castnewsfromthepointofviewofbothuserandproducer.Itwillrefertoseveral frameworks derived from the teaching of English to speakers of otherlanguages to argue that a greater knowledge of the needs of the non-nativespeaker could be beneficial to broadcasters. It will consider various initiativesthat have been taken both to teach English through the language of the newsand to help learners maintain their existing level of English, and by way ofexemplificationwillalsolookbrieflyattheroleofradiobroadcastinginAfrica. Finally, it will look forward to the effect on news English of new tech-nology platforms including online and mobile, and the predicted increase ininteractivity through blogs and vlogs, and will suggest two courses of actionfor future research on broadcast English.1. Introduction: News is Important to Broadcasting Organisations and to those Learning EnglishIn this paper I will be speaking to quite a large extent from personal experi-ence, and will thus make use of the first person pronoun both singular and,whenreferringtoeventsinvolvingcolleagues,plural.Ispentmycareerinitially as a classroom teacher and later, for 30 years, in the BBCs Englishlanguageteachingunitandwillthussometimesrefertoeventswhichareotherwiseunreported,butwhichmayinciteotherstocarryoutfurtherre-search.The news lies at the heart of the output of most broadcasting organisa-tions. There are many reasons why non-native speakers of English shouldmake their acquaintance with a station through its news bulletins. PerhapsthemostimportantistheirpredictabilitythestructureofnewsbulletinsHamish Norbrook264remains constant whatever their length. There will be a top, highlighting themain points, a number of stories depending on the length of the bulletin, andsometimes a tail, summarising the main points. It is possible for learners tomiss certain stories and yet be able to tune back into the bulletin at a pointthey will recognise, something that is far harder in a programme with a lesspredictable structure. The language, though including reports from differentlocations in a variety of accents, will be more controlled than in an unscripteddiscussion, and thus more predictable for the non-English speaker. More-over,thereisaconsiderablechancethatovertimelearnerswillpickupspecific aspects of news vocabulary.Several definitions and distinctions are necessary, starting with potentiallycontroversial terms such as non-native speaker of English or non-Englishspeaker. Although a handy way of segmenting an audience, they are apt tocause confusion and, sometimes, offence. An alternative phrase, a speakerwho does not have English as their mother tongue, has fallen into disuse. Aseemingly more objective substitute for native English, English as L1, canalsobecriticised,for,thoughitattemptstodefineEnglishasthefirstofseverallanguagesthatspeakersmayhaveattheirdisposal,itprovidesonly a diachronic view, referring back to the phase of first language acquisi-tion. A globally mobile citizen may well ultimately adopt the language of thecountry where they finally settle: if proficient in it, even if not in all registers ormodes, that new language could arguably be described as their second L1(seeCoulmas1981andthecontributionsinSingh1998).Whateverthelinguistic distinctions, international broadcasters will be interested primarilyin whether they can reach a large audience in English, or whether they wouldbe better advised to broadcast in a range of languages.Another distinction lies between, (1) learners, who are actively learningEnglish,whowillbediscussedinSection5,(2)thosemaintainingtheirexistinglevelofEnglishinanactivefashion,forexamplebydeliberatelylisteningtobroadcastsinEnglishratherthantheirownlanguage,and(3)those content to maintain such a level passively by not avoiding Englishlanguage broadcasts and web pages.Afurthertermwhichneedsexplanationisaudience.Itwasoriginallyused for theatres, but appropriated first by radio, then by television, and nowby new media internet and mobile platforms (such as mobile phones andPDAs). Referring only to radio, it is conventional to refer to the audience aslisteners. If watching television, they are viewers. If only accessing news viawebsites, they are users. The distinction between a lean-forward (active)and lean-back (passive) medium was initially used to differentiate internet(whichrequiresinterventionthroughakeyboardandmouseortouchpad)fromradioandTV,whereanOn/Offswitchorsimpleremotecontrolissufficient. However, I would argue that for non-native speakers both radioand television present the linguistic requirement to engage actively.The English of Broadcast News2651 IamparticularlygratefultoTonyCrossandcolleaguesattheEnglishServiceofRadioFrance Internationale (RFI) for their help in preparing this paper.2. Broadcasters, Language and LearnersItcanbeeasytoimaginethatbecauseofthetechnicalcomplexityoftheproductionprocessinvolvingrecorders,studiosandtransmittersthelanguage of broadcasts is harder for the learner than that of books. This isnot necessarily the case, since the first contact most learners have with anew language is in its spoken, not written, form. Handbooks for journalistsstressthatbroadcastlanguageoftenreferringtothenewsshouldbeseen as spoken language. Harriet Gilbert puts this precept succinctly into thisamusing picture:Alloverthecountry,radiostationsaredottedwithwriterstalkingtothem-selves at the keyboard, or standing in the corridor with eyebrows shooting allover the place and faces twisted into grimaces. If you can bring yourself tolookthatridiculous[]youllhavewrittenagoodscriptforradio.(Gilbert,quoted in Hicks 1998: 115)There is, admittedly, the irony that while our first experience of language isas speech, English may still be taught primarily as a written language, andthat while some school leaving exams insist on a spoken element, others donot.The predictability of the structure of a news bulletin, as mentioned earlier,canhelplearners.Anotherscaffoldingelementliesinthemostfrequentlexical domains in bulletins. Volkmer (1999: 190), writing in the context of theway development issues are reported, compares broadcasting strategies bydifferent types of news organisation (Public Service, Commercial), by differ-ent types of socio-political context (e.g. Post-communist Transition) and bytype of event, including Conflict, Diplomacy, Festival/Celebration and, intrigu-ingly, Curiosity. Besides its insight into the content of bulletins, such a para-digm can be useful for learners in defining and limiting the amount of vocabu-lary required to understand the concepts.Mostnewsroomsinlargebroadcastingorganisationswillhaveastyleguide to which journalists can refer at any time, and which will be mentionedin their induction to the station. It will codify general practice as well as issuesspecific to the station. Although potentially of interest to learners, style guidesare very much in-house documents. By way of illustration, consider currentpractice at Radio France Internationale (RFI), the External Services of RadioFrance.1The English Service is one of 19 foreign language units within RFI, broad-casting in English mainly to Africa and the Far East. Their style guide, whichstarts from the premise that many of their listeners will not have English astheir first language, has three parts.Hamish Norbrook266An introduction states the principles of writing for radio in general and fortheir listeners in particular. The first, and perhaps most important point, isthat journalists should imagine that they are writing for just one person. TheRFI guide also provides practical help on writing for the appropriate languagelevel of their audience, stressing that a story, once written, should be readaloud before going to the studio. A sentence that may be perfectly compre-hensibleinprintformmaysoundoddwhenspokenoutloudandthusdistract the listener. The pause required to work out the meaning may causethenon-nativespeakeraudiencetolosethethreadofthestory.TheRFIguide stresses also that political, cultural and historical references which areclear in one country may not be clear in another. Vocabulary should be assimple as the meaning allows.The guide goes on to list specific points that may trip up journalists writingin a hurry. They include three main categories. The first covers house jour-nalisticstyle,mentioningforexamplehowtorefertoculture-specificcon-cepts like parliaments, conventionalised names of reference, such as interna-tional agencies, and place names like cities (Milan, not Milano). The sec-ond combines language and journalism and includes the need for care whenmaking time references. Only some African countries are in the same timezone as Paris, so it may be safer to say earlier today than this morning.There is a special section on specific words such as terrorist, extremist andcommunity whose interpretations may vary vastly depending on a listenersown political or social point of view. Finally come a number of language andproduction points. Large numerals should be written out. It is much easier ina live broadcast to read three million, eight thousand than 3,008,000. Non-gender-specific terms such as synthetic rather than man-made should beused.Andthepointabouttheinclusionofthesub-ordinatingconjunctionthat,tobementionedagaininconnectionwiththeBBCSpecialEnglishNewsinSection5below,issummarisedmemorablyhereinthephraseBetter to overthat than to underthat.The RFI style guide also contains appendices on a number of relevanttopics including details of Arabic names, Chinese transliterations, the confus-ing Romanization of Asian languages and, since many of their journalists arebilingualinFrenchandEnglish,areminderofthedangeroffauxamis,literally false friends. The French actuellement means at present in Eng-lish, not actually; the French assister means to be present, not to help.3. The Ecosystem of the EFL LearnerNewsorganisationswillalsofindithelpfultofindoutaboutthoseoftheirusers who dont have English as their first language. There exist plenty ofsourcesofinformation,whichcanbetrawledatvariousdepths.Theper-The English of Broadcast News2672 These are now integrated into the Common European Framework, the scaffold for muchEuropean language learning. For more detailed information, compare the Council of Eu-ropes web-pages, in particular http://www.coe.int/t/dg4/linguistic/CADRE_EN.asp.ceived needs of the English learner have over the past 50 years created amajor global industry, involving a complex interdependent network of organi-sations including: Universities(which,amongotherthings,trainhigherlevelstudents,re-search effective teaching methods and develop new theories of teachingand learning); Examinationboards(whichdevisearangeofexamsfordifferentages,levels, skills and types of language); Education authorities (which allocate resources and implement changes intechnology and learning methods); Private and public language schools; Publishers and specialist authors; Organisations for teachers of English both international, such as IATEFL(theInternationalAssociationofTeachersofEnglishasaForeignLan-guage) and TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages)and national, such as ETAS (the English Teachers Association of Switzer-land); National and international cultural organisations such as the British Council,and finally Broadcasters who have experience in reaching a wide audience.Internationalbroadcastersmaywellfindthattheiruserssharecommonlanguage learning experiences with, perhaps, an attendant world view and can be categorised surprisingly easily in terms of language comprehen-sion. If a programme cannot be understood by a viewer from one countrywhose language level is known, then it is unlikely that a viewer from a differ-ent country with the same fluency level will suddenly understand it.Oneexampleofthepowerfulcumulativeeffectofthedifferentcompo-nents in an English language teaching course came in the late 1980s andthe1990s with the Follow Me project. This multi-country, multi-organisationproject was devised to help adult learners who had missed out on English atschool. The Council of Europe had at the time, under the guidance of JohnTrim,broughtoutnewfunctional/notionallanguagespecificationsWaystage and Threshold Level2 which provided the first step to a sylla-busdevisedbyauthorandcoursedesignerLouisAlexander.Alexanderssyllabusconsistedofacyclicalseriesof10themes,eachonetreatedatgreaterdepthinsuccessiveiterations.Thisflexibleapproach,enablingHamish Norbrook268broadcasters to schedule programmes in blocks of ten, with a built-in ele-mentofrevision,provedidealforthe60quarterhourTVandradioprogrammesmadebytheBBC,BavarianTelevision(BR),NorthGermanTelevision (NDR) and other European broadcasters. Learners who followedonly part of the series would nonetheless come away with a usable introduc-tion to the language. Longman, the BBC and partner publishers producedclassroom and self-study materials (books for students and teachers, audio,video).TheGermanAdultEducationAuthority(theDeutscherVolkshoch-schulverband) and partner organisations trained teachers in the methodologyof using the new audio-visual materials. Other broadcasters produced theirown version of the radio and TV series, most notably China Central Televi-sion(CCTV).Theirversion,presentedbyKathyFlower,reachedatotallynew audience.News organisations have at their disposal at least some points of refer-ence for the type of prior exposure to English that their users may have had.For instance, one approach that broadcasters could usefully be aware of isESP English for Specific (or Special) Purposes. This formed the basis foran imaginative British Council sponsored project in Switzerland in 1998, theESPAnti-Conference,whichwascarriedontheBBCLearningEnglishwebsite, complete with video interviews. The concept of teaching frequentwork-oriented elements of English to targeted groups of learners rather thanthe entire language to everyone may in part have come from excesses in thesituationalapproach.Itmaybefinetoteachgeneralstudentstoaskforinformation at the Post Office, to buy butter at the grocers, to suggest havinga cup of coffee at the caf. But if a group, say, of aeronautical engineers areworking on a multi-national aircraft construction project, a different approachis needed even if some of the underlying functional language is remarkablysimilar.Atfirstsight,thisESPmodelhaslittletodowithUnderstandingtheNews, which has tended to find itself allocated to the Language Skills sec-tion of ELT libraries. It is true that the relevant skills can be taught and testedeasily in class. Typical exercises could include the following:Listening for gist:Summarise that 2 minute radio interview in three sentences.Listening for specific points:Who also attended the meeting with the Prime Minister?Extensive reading:Read these five news stories and place them in what you feel is their order ofimportanceNon-verbal Communication Viewing for paralinguistic features:Watch this TV clip and describe the officials reaction when the reporter askedif he would resign.The English of Broadcast News269But ESP does focus well on aspects of broadcast English thatcancauseproblemsevenforadvancedlearners,suchasthepresenceofextendedinterpolations in livediscussions. In pre-recorded items sentences can beedited or simply re-recorded. In live broadcasts the speed of what is hap-pening can occasionally trip up even the most experienced presenters. And,in the same way that French, Russian or Chinese aeronautical engineers willbring their own knowledge and experience to an international project whereEnglish is the working language, so viewers and listeners will approach anEnglish medium bulletin with existing media skills for instance, the ability toevaluate the relevance and reliability of individual items.The New Zealand journalist and sociolinguist Alan Bell (Bell 1991: 150)identifiedanumberofareasofnewslanguagewhereproblemsofunder-standing can arise. One is the lack of correspondence between the narrativestructure of a story and the time structure to which it relates. Using Labovsnarrative structure (abstract, orientation, evaluation, complicating action andresolution) he shows that the narrative sequence does not follow the actualtemporal sequence. The reader, viewer or listener would intuitively be famil-iar with this journalistic convention from media in their own language. How-ever,unlesshandledwell,theprecisearrangementoftimereferencesinEnglish may cause a lack of total comprehension of the sequence of eventsfor non-native speakers.4. Objections to Linguistic ImperialismUnderlying the various influences mentioned in the previous section are twoassumptions. The first relates to the practice of cultural diplomacy (maintain-ing national influence through means such as access to films and books atlocal cultural centres, and educational visits to the country in question.) It istheassumptionthatlanguageformsapartofnationalidentity,andthatlearning the language will create affective links with the country concerned.International broadcasters have taught many languages over the years,with varying levels of accompanying political messages. In the late 1930s,theNaziregimeinGermanybroadcastradiolessonstoGermanslivingoutside the Reich whose grammar was felt to be faulty. The BBC has beenbroadcastingEnglishlanguageteachinglessonssince1939.Adedicateddepartment has existed since 1943, known successively as the Central Unit,BBC English by Radio (and, later, BBC English by Radio and Television),BBC English (see Leitner 1989) and, currently, BBC Learning English. In the1970s Radio RSA, the external services of the former apartheid governmentofSouthAfrica,producedAfrikaansradiolessonswithanovertlypoliticalmessage, justifying a white presence in Southern Africa. Radio Moscow andits successor organisations broadcast Russian lessons. Deutsche Welle hasHamish Norbrook270an excellent German teaching website and, somewhat more unexpectedly,since 1989 the Finnish broadcasting company YLE has been broadcastingNuntii Latini the news in Latin.The second assumption is that the teaching of a language such as Eng-lish will necessarily relegate the importance of other languages. The conceptoflinguisticimperialism,introducedbyPhillipson(1992),warnedofthedangers of a centre periphery model, where knowledge of English wasseen as one way of preserving a power structure in a post-colonial world.Pennycook (1994) develops this exploration of the implications of the spreadof English. The growth of the internet in the early 1990s led initially to theexpectationthatcyberspacewouldbemainlyAnglophone.But,withthearrival of internet friendly fonts for languages requiring more than the basicLatin alphabet, sites for languages other than English grew, such as the radiostation in western Nigeria which started putting up funeral orations in Yoruba.Traditionally given by a praise singer, families appreciated the fact that theoration now had a more permanent reality which, admittedly, they had topay for.DanielDorexaminesthelinguisticconsequencesofglobalization.Hesays that the internet (Dor 2004: 115) is indeed on the way to becoming amultilingual space but that this does not necessarily bring with it the idealsof freedom of the early web users. The reason is mainly that the agents ofeconomicglobalizationhaverealisedthatadaptingtolocalculturesandlanguages is a necessary component of staying competitive.5. Using the News to Teach EnglishNewspapersandjournalshavelongbeenusedinclassrooms.Teachersenjoyaskingstudentstoexplainthegrammarpointsbehindmisleading,and quite possibly apocryphal, newspaper headlines such as Giant wavesdown Queen Marys funnel (where Giant is an adjective rather than a noun);GeneralMcArthurfliesbacktofront(withfrontasanoun);andthegeopolitical nuances of an alleged 19th century London newspaper headline,Storm in Channel Europe isolated. More recently the Economist magazinecarriedafrontcoverwithapictureofGeorgeBushandTonyBlairandthecaptionAxisoffeeble(TheEconomist1319May2006)aplayonthephraseAxisofevilprovidinginterestingmaterialforphoneticslecturers.Broadcast news too has been used for language teaching and improve-ment. Early experiments in the use of radio to teach French are related byClark (1930) (see also Hendrix 1932, for consideration of passive acquisi-tion).FrenchlanguageteachingbasedonnewsitemsfromfrancophonetelevisionstationsreachedmainstreamBBCtelevisioninthe1980swithThe English of Broadcast News271Tljournal, a series presented by Chantal Cer explaining the language ofFrench TV news stories.There can be a narrow dividing line between using news items to teachlanguage, and broadcasting news stories using simplified language. In the1960s the BBCs English language teaching unit broadcast a dictation-speednews bulletin. A succession of news based programmes followed, includingNewsEnglish(withexplanationsentirelyinEnglish)andCurrentAffairsEnglish (written in a bilingual format with explanations in a variety of lan-guages). Voice of America is well known for its News in Special English,which has been running since 1959. A team of specially trained journalistswrite stories using a core vocabulary of 1,500 words, available to listeners.Simplesentencescontainingoneideaarereadataroundtwothirdsofnormal speed.In 1989 the BBC World Service began broadcasting its own BBC News inSpecialEnglishusuallyreferredtobyproductionstaffastheSlowSpeedNews. (The VOA team were courteous, if surprised, when we let them knowthat a similar title to their own had been used.) The production involved threedepartments:Newsroom,whichprovidedthebulletinandcheckedtheadapted version, Presentation, which trained newsreaders to read at roughlythree quarters of the normal speed, and the English language teaching unit,which simplified the language. This process was somewhat different to thatused by VOA, in that lexical simplification by means of a defining vocabularywas not used; syntactic simplification was applied to existing news storiesinstead.A BBC English producer would go to Newsroom two hours before trans-mission,andbegiventherelevantbulletinbythesub-editor.ThebulletinwouldthenbetranslatedintosimpleEnglish.Theprecisestyleofthistranslationdependedtoalargeextentontheproducersnativespeakerability to estimate which elements of the bulletin the listener would find hard.There was a time constraint the bulletin had to be ready 15 minutes beforetransmission to allow the newsreader time to read it through and check withthe BBC Pronunciation Unit if there were any unfamiliar words. These wordswereespeciallylikelytobethoseofpeopleandplacesthatwereeitherunfamiliar or had not previously featured in a story.Iregularlycameawayfromthetransmissionawarethattherewerephrases that I could have expressed better. While it was quite easy to dividelong sentences or add relative pronouns, the need to maintain Newsroomguidelines meant that it was not always simple to make the kind of alterationsthat English language teachers would instinctively make to aid comprehen-sion.As an example of the type of adaptation undertaken, here is a story fromthe BBC World Service1500 hours GMT bulletin of 16 September 1994, firstin its original form.Hamish Norbrook2721. Officials from North Korea and the United States have ended several daysof talks in Germany with North Koreans still refusing to bow to Americanpressure to buy nuclear reactors from South Korea.2. Both sides described the talks as full and frank.3. The Americans are pressing North Korea to replace its existing reactors,becausetheyproduceplutoniumwhichcouldbeusedfornuclearweapons.4. TheheadoftheNorthKoreandelegation,KimJongU,saidtheUnitedStates would have to finance the changeover, but his country reserved theright to find its own suppliers. [95 words]The BBC News in Special English (Slow News) version read as follows.1. Officials from North Korea and the United States have ended several daysof talks in Germany.2. The North Korean officials still refuse to listen to American demands to buynuclear reactors from South Korea.3. Officials from both countries said that the talks were full and frank.4. The Americans are insisting that North Korea replace its existing nuclearreactors, because they produce plutonium which could be used for nuclearweapons.5. The head of the North Korean delegation, Kim Jong U, said that the UnitedStates would have to finance the changeover, but that North Korea felt itshould be allowed to find its own suppliers. [104 words]The original first sentence has been split, dropping the with -ing construc-tion, which, though quite common in bulletins, might be less familiar to non-nativelisteners.Thephrasefullandfrankisacommoneuphemismforacrimoniousinthecontextofdiplomatictalks.However,itwasleftunal-tered, although it may have not been fully understood by the listener, as wehadnoproofthatacrimoniouswasthecorrectmeaninginthiscase.Insentence3/4pressingwhichmighthavebeenunderstoodinitsliteralsensewaschangedtoinsistingthatNorthKoreareplacewhichinretrospect also poses problems.Informal testing of the Slow News bulletins at various times indicated thatit was helpful to use that after say/claim/report as mentioned earlier withreference to the RFI style guide. Also, in terms of presentation, some infor-mal research into speed one of the controllable variables was carried out,and suggested that native speaker perceptions that the speed was too slowwerenotsharedbynon-nativespeakers.Intermsofcomprehensionitseemedthatchunkingwasimportant:notsomuchthelengthofpausesbetween sections, but where they were split up. Interpolations were a prob-lem for speakers of Slavonic languages, while cultural references, perhapsmore a problem for less experienced listeners, were explained where pos-sible.The English of Broadcast News273This applied to abbreviations such as NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Or-ganisation)andGCHQ(theUKsGovernmentCommunicationHeadquar-ters) where either the organisation might be unfamiliar or its presentation asa word rather than individual letters could cause problems. It also concernedspecifically UK based assumptions: for example, that the Prime Minister livesinNumber10(10DowningStreet),whichcanbeusedasametonymicreference to the Prime Minister.It is important to stress that these Slow News broadcasts always involveddiscussions with a Newsroom Sub-editor who had final say on the bulletin,which had to be judged as a straight bulletin as well as a way of teachingEnglish or helping listeners maintain an existing level of English. As I havepreviously said, all journalists aim to write as clearly and as simply as possi-ble. The stress here was on extending the base of the listenership to peoplewho might not otherwise have tuned in to an English medium bulletin.In 1989 a detailed examination of the language of broadcast news bulle-tins occurred when the BBC joined with HarperCollins Publishers to producetheBBCEnglishDictionary.ThelexicographicalworkwascarriedoutatCOBUILD (Collins Birmingham University International Language Database)under the direction of the late John Sinclair. COBUILD already had a largecorpus of news material, primarily print-based. The BBC provided some 80million additional words from the World Service Newsroom, with a further 9million from National Public Radio, Washington (NPR). The language wasnot spoken language in the pure sense of unscripted speech. Rather, it waswritten in the knowledge that it would be spoken into a microphone ratherthan typeset into a page in a newspaper. The 70,000 citations from the BBCcontent were compared with COBUILDs existing news content and differ-ences noted. The word business, for instance, appeared more frequently inthe COBUILD corpus, but new senses arrived with the BBC data: businessas usual, do business with, the SDP is still in business. To marginaliseappeared in the BBC, but not in COBUILD. There were differences in collo-cation for the word zone between the BBC security zone and COBUILD free trade zone.TheNPRdatagaveaninsightintotheEnglishofAmericanbroadcastnews. It was possible to trace the introduction of new phrases such as themilitarytermcollateraldamage(whentroopsorciviliansarekilledorwounded accidentally by their own side). Originally, NPR commented thisphraseaswhatthemilitaryrefertoascollateraldamage.Asthephrasebecame more widely used they reduced it to collateral damage (the quota-tion marks indicating to the newsreader that the phrase was not in commonuse)andfinally,asitwasusedmorewidelyandalsoinmetaphoricallyextended ways, with no quotation marks. The morphological productivity ofAmerican news English was much in evidence in other respects as well from familiar noun verb conversion the scud impacted the Gulf to lessHamish Norbrook274common back-formations, in this case from the noun attrition with all theair assets we have it will attrit a lot of the enemy and with all of his losseshes definitely being attritted.InareviewofTheBBCEnglishDictionaryforTheModernLanguageJournal Vol. 77 No. 3 Stephen Gaies (1993) notes the use of ordinary Eng-lishsentencesfullsentencedefinitionsforcollocationsandrestricteduses, such as one of the definitions for succeed: If you succeed anotherperson, you are the next person to have their job or position (BBC EnglishDictionary 1992: 1169). He also notes the absence of maps in the encyclope-dic data. While their absence was in part due to cost and production factors,there was also the fact that the dictionary was being prepared at the time ofthe momentous political changes marking the break-up of the Soviet Union.NewcountriestooksometimetofindpreciseEnglishequivalentsoftheirnew names: Kyrgyzstan, for example, which for a time was also referred toas Kirgizia, Khirghizia and Kyrghizia (BBC English Dictionary 1992: 645).6. Broadcasting in English in AfricaPerhapsoneofthemostfamousmodelsfortherepresentationofWorldEnglisheshasbeenproposedbyB.B.Kachru(1982)intheformofthreeconcentric circles: the inner circle refers to those countries where English isanativelanguage(ENL)andtheoutercircletothosewhereEnglishisapost-colonial second language (ESL); the expanding circle, finally, includescountrieswhereEnglishisaforeignlanguage(EFL).Thesecondcircle,therefore, includes, among others, Anglophone countries in Africa, an impor-tant audience for international radio broadcasters. The impact of broadcast-ing generally, including educational broadcasting, is instructive (Wilson 1952,Norbrook and Ricketts 1997). Language policy in Africa has been revisitedover the years (Schmied 1991), with different emphasis being placed on theneed for a standard model of English appropriate for an African country, oron the use of a language or languages other than English. It might actuallybe better to say standard models of English, since one model (discussed atvarious times by experts such as Professors Ayo Banjo and Ayo Bamgbose;see Bamgbose 1991) envisages different varieties of English for use at locallevel (in the Nigerian context between a group of adjoining states), nationallevel (for use in the civil service), regional level (with adjoining countries) andinternationally.The administrative costs of language policy have directly affected broad-casters,aswaspointedoutbyApoloNsibambiofMakereUniversity(Nsibambi 1971) in his paper Language Policy in Uganda: An Investigationinto Costs and Politics. When Uganda achieved independence in 1962, henotes (1971: 62), [] Radio Uganda was broadcasting in English, Luganda,The English of Broadcast News275Runyoro/Rutoro,AtesoandLwo.In1967PresidentMiltonOboteaddedanother ten languages. By 1969 yet more had been added, making a total ofeighteen. Nsibambi, who became Prime Minister of Uganda in 1999, makesit clear that this was being done for political reasons despite the excessivefinancial costs to Radio Uganda (1971: 64). He proposed a pragmatic solu-tion, reducing the number of languages according to criteria including mutualintelligibility, population, utility, the past history of the linguistic situation andpolitical factors.Whilemostpeoplehavelittlechoiceoverthelanguageusedintheirworking lives, multilingual authors can decide which language best fits whattheywanttosayandhowtheprocessofreachingtheaudienceshouldwork. A highly publicised such case is the Kenyan author Ngugi Wa Thiongo(Pennycook 1994: 264), who after a distinguished literary career writing inEnglish took the decision to write in his first language, Gikuyu, and then havehis books translated. Other authors have chosen to retain the English lan-guage as a means of literary expression in order to reach as wide a nationaland internatioinal audience as possible. This was the decision taken by theNigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa, who was executed by the Nigerian authori-tiesin1995.HewasamemberoftheOgonipeopleintheNigerdelta,asource of great oil wealth to Nigeria as a whole, but wealth which he arguedhad bypassed his own people. He had previously written a television seriesBasi and Company, which had specifically used English to get his messageacross. His sole novel, Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, which won anhonourable mention in the 1987 Noma award for publishing in Africa, useslanguage which he describes as rotten English. It is a language that maynotexistinrealitypreciselyinthisformbut,madeupasitisofelementstaken from the linguistic landscape of contemporary Nigeria, captures boththe leading character, forced to lead the life of a soldier, and the fracturednature of the Nigerian state at that time of the Biafran secessionist war. AsMichael North puts it in his paper on Saro-Wiwa: [] to write in Khana, thelanguage of the Ogoni people, would have made him unreadable to all but aninfinitesimal handful of Nigerians (North 2001).WithanotherNigerianwriter,ChinuaAchebe,whobecamefamousin1956withthepublicationofhisfirstnovel,ThingsFallApart, thereisaninteresting link between the language used by the author and broadcasting.Achebes path to becoming a writer was influenced by the time he spent asa talks writer in the Nigerian Broadcasting Service (Ezenwa-Ohaeto 1997).He later became Head of Talks for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation (asthe NBS had become), later still working as Controller of the Eastern regionand Head of the Voice of Nigeria. Ezenwa-Ohaeto notes the influence thatthespokenwordhadonAchebe:Hewaspreoccupiedwithwhatmakesspeech memorable and cultivated the difference between a literary styleand a spoken style (1997: 57).Hamish Norbrook2763 TelefonrundspruchusedtoexistinallfourlinguisticregionsofSwitzerlandand,amongmany others, also broadcast BBC ELT programmes; it was switched off in 1998.7. New TechnologyUntilafewyearsago,whenwirelesstechnologybecamecommonandlaptopusersstartedhuntingforhotspotsinplacessuchasairportsandlibraries,acomputerinternetconnectionwastakentobesomethingthatinvolved a phone line. A somewhat similar trajectory from wired to wirelesshad been followed 60 years previously by radio broadcasting in West Africa,asoutlinedbyHead(1979:3944)andMacKay(1964:15).Shortwaveradio transmissions were subject to sunspots and other atmospheric distur-bances, and so an alternative distribution system known variously as wiredwireless, RDS Radio Distribution System or rediffusion was sometimesused to distribute BBC programmes originating in London to the colonies.When Sir Arnold Hodson became Governor of what was then the Gold Coastin 1934 he used experience he had gained developing RDS in the FalklandIslands six years earlier to launch a similar system. Such systems have beenin use in many countries Telefonrundspruch, in Switzerland, for example.3There were no locally originated programmes, and the quality of the Englishused in the linking announcements made by local technicians was criticisedin 1938 by unofficial (i.e. African) members of the Legislative Council. Thetechnicians were soundly defended by Hodson (Head 1979: 43), and in duecourselocallyoriginatedprogrammeswereproducedthroughoutWestAfrica. Shortly after the Gold Coast became independent as Ghana, a bookby Henry Swanzy (1958) appeared. It featured literary contributions in proseandversetotheGhanaBroadcastingSystembetween1955and1957,which are seen by Carrington (1959: 119) in a review of this book, as thefirst appearance of a Ghanaian national literature.ItisgoingtoofartoattributeGhanaianliteraturetotheintroductionofradio.However,itwasthatshiftfromwired,relayedprogrammesfromLondon to locally produced ones that caused the development in countriessuchasNigeriaofgroupsofbroadcasterswhocouldeloquentlypresentideas of a political as well as a literary nature (Mackay 1964: 10; see alsoArmour (1984) for the later period of 19461957 and Wilkinson (1972)). Thisnational radiophonic eloquence was perhaps not entirely the intention of theEarl of Plymouth, who in 1936 had chaired a report into the future of broad-castinginthecolonieswhichmentionedtheindirectpropagandavaluetoBritain of broadcasting to the colonies. There was no mention then that thecolonies might broadcast back.In 2004 I gave a talk in Professor Schmieds seminar at Chemnitz Univer-sity on a mobile English learning project the BBC had been carrying out inChina, and also on the News section of the BBC Learning English website.The English of Broadcast News277When setting up the original site in 1996 I had talked with the UKs educa-tionaltechnologyorganisation,nowknownasBeCTA,aboutthekindofcontent that might be appropriate for the site. They had pointed out that theBBC was associated with news and so a section explaining news languagewasstarted,calledinitiallyWords,Words,Words,laterchangingtitletoWordsintheNews.Atfirstitappearedonlyinhypertextform.Whenitbecamepossibletoputstreamedaudioonthewebwestartedtakinganaudio report from a BBC correspondent, selecting words we felt were diffi-cult, providing a written explanation and also the audio of the word in isola-tion read at both slow and natural speed, with a short pause for repetition.This multimedia approach, using two senses, had proved successful in thepast, with language courses including disks, cassettes, CDs or CD-ROMs.The internet made it possible once again, in this case free of charge.In many ways this was a similar model to the earlier BBC News in SpecialEnglish, with the same snag of relying on native speaker intuition as to whatbitsoflanguagemightprovedifficultandwhichmightbeusefultolearn.ProfessorSchmiedarrangedforpartoftheseminartobeturnedintoafeedbacksession.Samplestorieswereexamined,thelanguagepointsselected and the explanations given commented on by an audience mainlyconsisting of students of English. The results showed that while those nativespeakerintuitionsweretoquiteanextentvalid,someitemsthathadnotbeenexplainedshouldhavebeen,whiletheexplanationofotherswasunnecessary; furthermore it appeared necessary to avoid the trap of makingthe explanation harder than the original item.This shows two things. First, that technology is changing fast so broad-casters interested in language need to make decisions about possible futurereactions of their audience. Second, that the important underlying questionsabout language and learning dont necessarily alter all that much, and centrearound understanding and the nature of any explanation provided.Whilebroadcastershavealwaysencouragedlistenerandviewerre-sponse, sometimes making programmes involving audience feedback, theinternet changed the nature of the relationship, since everyone can now betheir own publisher. The generic title for this content when used by broad-casters was initially user generated content; more recently, with the rise ofsites such as MySpace and FaceBook, it is termed social networking. Eitherway, it can cause headaches for website owners. (There are perhaps someanalogies with the change from rediffusion to locally originated broadcasts inAfrica.) For the learner, the crucial points are that the language is not moder-ated and may not come from a native speaker.In 1997 an email based discussion group on the BBC Learning Englishwebsite was started, enabling learners to chat (in a moderated, asynchron-ous way) about topics that interested them. In language learning terms, thiswastheequivalentincyber-spaceoftheLanguageDiscussionCircleofHamish Norbrook278earlier days. The news provided the BBC discussion group with some topicsfor discussion. When international crises occurred, moderation could becomehard but BBC guidelines were available for producers involved in modera-tion, and the group members were self regulating by sticking to discussion ofthe language involved in reporting events.Early on, a decision was taken not to correct the language used in theposts,thoughwesometimesemailedbacktomemberssuggestingtheyrephrase particular points. At one level this was a pragmatic decision: wehadneithertimenortheresourcestocorrecteverypost.Atanother,anethical decision was involved, despite the fact that it was at first sight incon-gruous for an English teaching website with the BBC label to carry posts withmisspellingsandfaultygrammar.Changingthewayinwhichnon-nativespeakers express themselves can in some cases alter what they are tryingto say. We were neither entirely in the role of teachers (complete with thehtml equivalent of red pens) nor of desk editors in a publishing house. As itturnedout,severalgroupmembershadatalentrespondingtopleasforlinguistic help (apparent or otherwise) and one of them went on to start a firmteaching languages over the internet.Most broadcasters will not have exactly this problem of users expectinglinguistic feedback. However, there is a massive growth in all forms of useroriginated content that has not gone through an editorial process, in otherwords, with reactive moderation, where users complain about the content ofparticular items rather than active moderation of everything. This may even-tually cause problems for both their non-native-speaker audience and indeedfornativespeakerusersnotexpectingtocomeacrosswhatsomewoulddoubtlesscallrottenEnglish.ExamplesofthistypeofcontentincludeWorld Cup Webcam. During the 2006 football World Cup in Germany, fansviewing BBC World TV were invited to express their opinions live on televi-sion.Alltheyneededwasawebcamandabroadbandconnection.Thepersonal experiences of a worker who had moved to Shanghai added greatlyto the authentic tone of a BBC World Service series on emerging industrialgiants. And many broadcasters have blogs (weblogs) and sometimes theirvideoequivalent,vlogs(videoweblogs),forindividualprogrammesorforparticular sections of their audience.As part of the collaboration with Chemnitz, Professor Schmied arrangedfor one of his research students, Katrin Uhlig, to come to the BBC and com-pare,fromtheperspectiveofaGermanspeakinglinguisticsspecialist,various strands of news output, including the language used in the coverageofthesamestorybyvariousinternationalbroadcasters.Oneareaofherwork was particularly interesting in the light of the growth of user generatedcontent: an analysis of posts by native and non-native speakers to a BBCMessage Board dealing with current affairs issues. Her findings shed newlight on the length of posts, which were often longer when written by non-The English of Broadcast News279native speakers, who also tended to address the author of the original postor the previous writer in the thread, and to give extended explanations fortheir opinions. Uhlig also considered register, with the informality of nativespeakers contrasting with the more formal style adopted by some non-nativespeaker groups. Whether these differences are due to age, familiarity withelectroniccommunicationorpriorEnglishlanguagelearningexperiencecould not be determined.8. How Can News Broadcasters Help Learners and Themselves?In the introduction I mentioned two possible audiences for this paper: learn-ers interested in using news broadcasts (in the widest sense) to maintain orimprove their English, and broadcasters themselves. It is the broadcasterswho have most to gain from a consideration of news language. Learners canalwaysturntoothertypesofauthenticlanguageinthemediasports,music and drama (including soap operas.) From all of these they will gainlinguistic and also social insights. News broadcasters, however, are facedwith a dilemma. Should they reach out to the growing third circle of userswhohaveEnglishasasecondorthirdlanguage?Orshouldtheyaimatnativespeakercomprehension?Therearevariousshadesinbetween.Good news writing has many of the characteristics of good writing for learn-ers: clarity, concision and the goal of getting a message a story across.Context can be explained, as can extra-linguistic elements. Short interviewswherecomplexlanguageisusedcanbeglossedinthesurroundingan-nouncements. On television and the web good visuals whether photos orgraphics can help clarify complex stories. Style guides can lay down guide-lines for journalists. Nonetheless, it is my contention that language remainsone of the major controllable barriers to the uptake of broadcast news.How can this challenge be approached by broadcasters? First, by classi-fying what they are broadcasting, second, by analysing the language, andthird, by changing what is written in such a way as to make it more accessi-ble without oversimplifying it. There has been talk of the dumbing down oftelevision. No news organisation wants to be accused of producing MickeyMouse stories. Yet they all wish to increase the number of their listeners,viewers and website users.There is a further justification for making the news as comprehensible aspossible. While access to accurate, impartial information is not as fundamen-tal as the right to freedom, water or food, if societies want to develop, provid-ing opportunities for all their citizens, it is important nevertheless. The 1945constitution of UNESCO mandated it to promote the free flow of ideas byword and image. (Hargreaves and Thomas 2002) It is within this context thatI propose the compilation of an international corpus of news English. (Obvi-Hamish Norbrook280ouslyIwouldhopethatsimilaronescouldbeestablishedforotherlan-guages.) Without an accurate analysis of what is actually happening acrossthe media and across broadcasting organisations one cannot even hope tostart defining what news English is.Documenting and investigating current developments in the language ofnews broadcasting by means of a corpus is in theory quite feasible if fundingand policy problems can be overcome. Successful international cooperationhas produced corpora designed for the study of regional variability in stan-dard Englishes worldwide (ICE the International Corpus of English) or thecomparativestudyoflearnerEnglishproducedbystudentsofdiverseL1background (ICLE the International Corpus of Learner English). What hashampered the development of some corpora is access to a sufficient quantityof language. Broadcasters can supply this with no problem. In fact, one of thefirst problems in such a venture would actually be where to start the compila-tion, given the vast amount of possible data to include.As an example of one kind of phenomenon which I regard as particularlypromising for detailed study, consider the treatment of the same material indifferentwaystracingforexamplethelinguisticprogressofanuneditedaudio interview through different stages: after basic editing (involving non-editorial functions such as removing somehesitations, repetitions and false starts) as broadcast on radio (after editorial intervention, such as altering the orderof questions and shortening or omitting some answers) as used in a news summary (language which is written to be spoken) transferred to a web page, with appropriate accompanying image transferred to a mobile platform, where concision is important.(adapted from the original print model in Bell 1991: 3355)OthersubsetsofdatameritingcloserscrutinycouldincludethelanguageusedinvariouseventsascategorisedbyVolkmer(1999:190),alreadyquotedanddiscussedinSection2above.TheycouldprovideabasisforresearchandindeedpublicationforinstanceanupdatedversionoftheminimallanguageusedbyVOASpecialEnglishpossiblyinfluencedbyideas from the concept of English as an International Language. Traditionalsubsetssuchasfinancial,businessandpoliticalEnglishwouldalsoyieldlinguistic information.However, though practical linguistically, problems of a financial and policynatureabound.Fewbroadcasterswouldbehappytoallowuncontrolledaccess to their content. Editorial misjudgements not to mention typographi-cal errors would be displayed to all. One solution might be for groups ofbroadcasterstopoolasampleoftheiroutput.AswefoundwiththeBBCEnglish Dictionary, broadcasters can easily provide statistically representa-tive samples. English language broadcasters within the European Broadcast-ingUnion,theAsianBroadcastingUnion,theArabstatesBroadcastingThe English of Broadcast News2814 I would like to thank the following for their help in the preparation of this paper: AndrewThompson,PaulScottandCarolineDunton,BBCLearningEnglish;JeffWalden,BBCWrittenArchivesCentre;TonyCross,RadioFranceInternationale;ProfessorDr.JosefSchmied, Chemnitz University.UnionandtheCommonwealthBroadcastingAssociationcouldbeap-proached. Perhaps the most interesting international broadcaster to emergein recent years is Al-Jazeera. With its main production centres in London,DubaiandKualaLumpur,thoseheardonitwouldprobablyprovideaninteresting cross-section of English across the globe.I will end with one further suggestion for research on radio and televisionbroadcasts the human voice. The quality of the language used by a stationis important, but so too is the voice of the individual newsreader or presenter and this is far harder to evaluate. 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