Critical Discourse Analysis: Understanding Power and Meaning in Texts, Sintesi del corso di Lingua Inglese

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Week 5: What is Critical Discourse Analysis EDUC

Quick review

Identify: Process, Participant, Circumstance

1. We own every little bush, every little tree.
2. On 10 July four men approached the British in a small canoe fitted with outriggers.

A quick review

• (^) Critical Discourse Analysis
• (^) Discourse

What is Critical Discourse Analysis

(CDA)?

MacLure (2003)

• (^) Allan Luke (1995): ‘one of the main tasks of discourse analysis is to ‘disarticulate’ the texts of everyday life as a way of ‘disrupting common sense’ about the naturalness or inevitability of identities, values and concepts, thus showing the workings of power and material interests in the most seemingly innocent of texts.’ (p9)

Gee’s notion of Discourse

In simple terms: An identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognise.

Gee’s notion of Discourse

Gee continued: ‘Club membership’ – there are ways of displaying (through words, actions, values and beliefs) membership in a particular social group or social network (people who associate with each other around a common set of interests, goals and activities) Sanctions exist of you ‘break’ the rules.

Aim

• (^) To further explore what it means to do a Critical Discourse Analysis
• (^) To consider the relationship between grammatical form and meaning
• (^) To introduce more tools, especially Theme and Mood

Outline

• (^) Review of CDA and Discourse
• (^) Fairclough’s approach to CDA
• (^) The Janks questions
• (^) Back to school: practising basic CDA
• (^) Some issues with CDA
• (^) Grammar: form v meaning
• (^) Theme
• (^) Mood
• (^) Tutorial

Fairclough’s dimension of discourse and discourse analysis

Fairclough’s dimension of discourse and discourse analysis Description: what does it look like? (text analysis) Explanation: why is it this way? (social analysis) Interpretation : what does it all mean? (processing analysis)

Back to school…

• (^) High School Musical
• (^) Donnie Darko

Janks (1997)

• (^) Estrangement and engagement (with and against the text) ‘Engagement without estrangement is a form of submission to the power of the text regardless of the reader’s own positions. Estrangement without engagement is a refusal to leave the confines of one’s own subjectivity, a refusal to allow otherness to enter .’ (p331)

Janks (1997)

‘What I am ultimately looking for are patterns that I can use to establish hypotheses about discourses at work in society. I then try to confirm or disconfirm these hypotheses by looking for other related texts.’ (p331) ‘The strength of CDA is that the different dimensions of analysis that it offers provide the means both for producing research questions and analysing data.’ (p341)

Before we move on to

grammar…

a word of critique about CDA