A Move Analysis of the Concluding Sections of Televised Sports News Presentations in Ghana

The study presents an analysis of the concluding sections of televised sports news (TSN), an aspect of a stand-alone sports news broadcast, of selected Ghanaian television stations aimed at exploring their schematic structure. The study uses the genre-based theory from the perspectives of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) to analyze 50 televised sports news from Ghana Television (GTV), Metropolitan Entertainment Television (Metro TV) and TV3 Network Limited (TV3). The findings reveal that this unique genre has five rhetorical moves and the move sequence is characterized by irregular patterns. The results further reveal that the choice of words (language use) in the concluding sections of the TSN is influenced by the distinct communicative purposes of the five moves. Also, Move 4 (Creating Awareness of Impending Sporting Activities) has the largest space in the concluding sections of TSN whilst Move 5 (Well Wishes) occupies the least space. The study has implications for media and communication studies serving as a model to assist novice radio and television sports presenters by facilitating their successful acculturation into the discourse community of sports journalism. The study also has implications for the genre theory in general and sports discourse in particular.