| As is known to us, we are living in an era of information and technology. Nowadays it is very convenient and easy to access to any kind of information. News, as a major type of information based on which we learn about the occurrences of the world, is shaping our understanding of the world. Since English is the most influential international language, English news is dominating world media. With the dominance of English news, most universities and colleges introduce English News Reading as a supplementary course for English majors. Since news is a type of public discourse, news reading requires readers to take social and cultural factors into consideration, like against what backdrop the news is produced, distributed and consumed. However, based on her own learning and teaching experience, the author found that most teachers still confine their teaching to imparting vocabulary and sentence structures rather than analyze the production, interpretation and explanation of news from a critical perspective.In this study, at first, the author demonstrates the feasibility of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in news analysis through a case study. Then the author conductes a survey in Hainan University and Hainan Normal University to investigate the current situation of English news teaching. By combining the theories of CDA, critical media literacy, critical thinking, systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and the survey of news reading in the classroom, the author proposes a specific pedagogical model which she hopes to be experimented in the near future.This study comes to several conclusions. Firstly, theories on critical linguistics and systemic functional linguistics can be applied to the analysis of news reports so as to discover the hidden ideologies and explain the relationship among power, language and ideologies. Secondly, the survey indicates that there is a total lack of critical literacy in English News Reading Classroom, which is not good for developing students’critical language awareness and critical thinking that are desirable qualities of students in the21st century. Thirdly, the marriage of critical linguistics and media literacy conduce to English news reading. |
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