GRAMMATICAL ERROR ANALYSIS OF SELECTED NEWS SCRIPTS OF THE BROADCASTING CORPORATION

This study was carried out in respect to the grammatical errors that currently exist in the Broadcasting Corporation of Abia State Radio, Umuahia. The sole aim of this study was to carefully investigate the above station’s news scripts, examine their structure, and to find out the causes, types and patterns of grammatical errors which include punctuation, concord, omission, preposition and pluralisation errors in the selected news scripts of different years. The most selected news scripts used were world news, news in brief, news headlines, news package, news segment, and news digest. The data were collected from the news room of the BCA Radio, Umuahia, which represents other media houses all over the country. Each of the above news scripts was selected and surveyed on a daily basis for a period of three weeks and was finally used for the study. The data used were analysed using a simple percentage calculations, while a simple randomisation method was adopted in collecting the data. From the findings, it was believed that those grammatical errors were as a result of the low level of education of the media workers, especially the journalists and the incomplete mastery of the English language among the broadcasting corporation bodies like the news casters or reporters which has a negative impact on the listeners because listeners rely on word meanings of these news as absolutely correct. However, to remedy these ugly situations that have befallen the media houses here in Nigeria, the researcher recommended that broadcasting authorities should employ only well-qualified language experts that are highly proficient in the English language to serve as editors who will competently proofread the news lines before they are broadcast.

Today, a good number of people across the world listen to news. In the Nigerian society, a lot of people, most especially the elite, listen to news to get adequate updates concerning events and happenings in society. Consequently, this has led to the evolution of a plethora of more news media in the country over the years. Also, news items are often constructed in certain structures to specifically capture the highlights of ideas and stories in news scripts. Tiono (20) argues that in order to attract listeners’ attention, journalists make the scripts sound so interesting that listeners become more curious to know the content of the whole story and thereby listen to news in detail. This entails that the professionalism of a journalist is measured by his ability to use the language appropriately and thereby he ought to be a standard bearer of English usage because he does more than writing. He edits write-ups from other people; he comments and criticizes them, and he puts the news lines together.