A move Analysis of the Ghana Premier League Football Match Previews on a Ghanaian Television Sports Show

Abstract

The investigation of online genres has significantly expanded over time. This has led researchers to examine a range of internet genres, including pre-match previews of football games, live text commentary, sports news presentation programmes, news websites, minute-by-minute match reports online, weblogs, and post-game interviews. This study investigated the schematic structure (i.e., the different moves, the frequency of moves, the sequence of moves, and the textual space of each identified move) and the key lexico-grammatical resources deployed in match previews. The study used six match previews, using data from the Max TVGH Facebook page and Bhatia's (2017) move analysis framework. The analysis revealed that the producers of the football match preview used a six-move structure, including introducing the match preview, discussing the content, assessing the squad, predicting the score-line, advertising and involving viewers. On textual space, it must be emphasised that Move 2 (discussing the content) occupied the most significant space. There was no linear form in the moves’ sequential arrangement as some moves are repeated in all episodes. Regarding lexico-grammatical resources, the study revealed that referring elements, hypotactic verbs, and descriptive adjectives dominate the moves in the Ghana Premier League football match previews. This study has implications for further research and practice in academic and sports discourses. For instance, a comparative genre analysis of football match previews on radio and television can be done with particular attention paid to using names in various genres since it is a unique culture