Normitallaajan näkökulmasta yrityksen näkökulmaan. Yliopisto-opiskelijoiden tulkintoja talousuutisesta

Authors

• Heli Katajamäki Vaasan yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.70484/vakki.149080

Keywords:

talousuutinen, kriittinen lukutaito, näkökulma

Abstract

Understanding business news is generally considered a difficult task, requiring specializedknowledge. Their interpretation is also influenced by their socio-cultural context and the institution producing them. The purpose of this article is to describe whether and how a group of university students understands the point of view from which a journalistic business news item has been produced. The material is a business news story published in the Finnish businessnewspaper Kauppalehti in February 2011. The theoretical framework of the study is applied linguistics, critical media literacy and Critical Discourse Analysis. Media texts are regarded as contextual phenomena in a discursively constructed society. The analysis shows that the students give 83 interpretations of the point of view of the text. The interpretations are sorted into 12 categories, the point of view being ‘a group of people, consumer, employee, company/factory/manager, brewery industry, investor/shareholder, state of economy, other countries, state/tax collector, writer, expert’ and ‘can’t say’. The interpretations are usually based on explicit meanings construed in the text and cannot - as a rule - be considered an ability in the students to make critical remarks. The results also suggest that the level of text understanding is connected to a student’s area of study, in this case economics/business studies.