A critical discourse analysis of the audience’s evaluation of telecommunication service providers’ advertisements in Nigerian newspapers

Abstract

Critical discourse analysts often depend on textual analysis for the interpretation and evaluation of the ideological effects of the text on the audience. This usually undermines the audience’s interpretation and role in discourse studies. Thus, this paper reports the audience’s evaluation of language use in telecommunication service providers’ advertisements in Nigerian newspapers. The objectives of the study were to investigate and evaluate the readers’ awareness of the manipulation of language used in the advertisements. The study adopted Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis and Hall’s encoding and decoding theory as its theoretical framework. It used a survey method in which questionnaires were used as an instrument for data collection. The questionnaires were administered to 200 respondents selected randomly from two universities in Nigeria which were selected purposefully based on regional representation. The data were analysed quantitatively. The overall results of the audience evaluation of language used in the advertisements show that the majority of the respondents were aware of the manipulation of the language used in the advertisements and its effects (73%). The overall results of the interpretation of the advertisements as a discursive practice show that more than half of the respondents could interpret the force of the representation (55%).  But the overall results of examination of advertisements as social practice show that more than half of the respondents could not evaluate the manipulation of the language used as part of the ideological manipulation of consumers within the capitalists’ ideology (53%). Therefore, the paper concludes that the textual analysis is not adequate to determine the ideological effect of the language used in the advertisement texts.