Assessment of Styles and Quality of Articulation by Presenters of the Africa Independent Television and Channels Television Stations, Nigeria

Abstract

Television broadcasting is important to educate the populace on their rights, economic activities and their potentials, culture and customs, among other issues. So there is greater need to improve on the quality of news presenters’ skills to be able to discharge this important responsibility optimally. The inability of most presenters to express their ideas smoothly and precisely in words, sentences, idioms and other expressive grammatical constructions is worrisome. This miscommunication bears a piece of communication with linguistic signs that do not express the intended message to the target audience. This study assessed the style and quality of articulation by presenters of the Africa Independent Television and Channels Television stations. The study utilized the primary data source of focus group discussion among final year students of Mass Communication and English Departments of University of Jos and Plateau State University, Bokkos on the recorded contents of the Channels and AIT broadcasts. The study found among other things that the Channels TV presenters do not have heavy accent, but have polished and fluent language and can speak like the Americans while AIT has an undertone accent. AIT targets the African population, so they present their news naturally without twisted tongue. The news presenter’s voice in Channels is captivating while AIT presenters sometimes have high pitched voice. Channels presenters are fast and their audiences need to pay close attention before getting the message and AIT presenters have slower speech rate which makes for easy assimilation of their news by their audiences. The study concluded that while the two stations are performing very well in Nigeria and on the global television broadcasting space, AIT presenters have better style, accent, speech and greater skills and experiences. The study recommends among other things that: the level of presentations of the two stations, especially that of Channels television should be continuously improved to enable them perform their functions to the public professionally; the quality of speech, accent, voice and originality of presentation should be improved for both stations to continuously improve along with global broadcasting code and realities.