Critical Discourse Analysis Of Political News Reports In American And British Newspapers

Language, which functions as a means of communication, develops side by side with human society and is closely related to individual and social needs. So language is social and is not, as traditional linguistics claims, a transparent medium for communication about an objective world, which tends to be well recognized and taken seriously by modern linguists."Critical Linguistics", which was developed by Roger Fowler and Gunther Kress, etc. from the late 1970s, is based mainly on Halliday's systemic-functional grammar. It seeks to reveal the ideology and power relations which are concealed in public discourses and to expose the counteraction of public discourses on the formation of people's ideology. News reports are official discourses and are inevitably influenced by domain ideologies, so they can affect and control people's cognition directly or indirectly and remain a significant factor in the formation of people's ideologies and attitudes, though the ideologies cloaked in them are less obvious than those in other public discourses such as editorial, news analysis and advertisements, etc.This thesis first provides an introduction of the current analytic tool ?Critical Linguistics, and then conducts specific analysis of some original news reports which are taken from a few well-known newspapers in the United States and Britain so as to assist ESL learners to get familiar with the practice of this analytic tool. The article concludes with a discussion of the urgency and significance of introducing critical linguistics into our country's second language education, instructing ESL learners in critical discourse analysis, and increasing their consciousness against Western ideologies.The practical significance of this study lies in enhancing Chinese English learners' awareness against the infiltration of Western ideologies while they are improving their English and obtaining information.