| Critical discourse analysis, emerged in the 1970s, mainly absorbs Systematic Functional Grammar by Halliday and makes the news discourse as its main research subject. The purpose is to analysis discourse in specific social backgrounds, to reveal the ideology hidden in the surface form of language as well as the counterproductive effect of ideology on the form of discourse, thus awaken people's critical awareness to the news discourse.Based on the four specific analytical tools in Systematic Functional Grammar: classification, modality, transitivity and transformation, by quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis, this paper tentatively makes a comparative study on two news reports about Gaza conflict on April 1,2010, which are chosen from the official websites of Time and International Herald Tribune. The results show that the two discourses have both similarities and obvious differences. It is found that both reports selectively use different words to describe the same event, and their uses of nominalization are the same, and their purposes are to service for their power authorities. Due to their different ideologies, the highlights of the reports are different. Different expressions of the discourse can influence readers' attitudes toward the events, and the reporters' ideologies and their attitudes toward the events also can potentially affect their reports. The results of the study show that news reports are far from objective, and critical discourse analysis is a powerful tool of revealing the relationship between language and ideology.The findings imply that discourse teaching can't be separated from cultural context, and that discourse is always related with a certain kind of culture. In English news discourse teaching, we can combine the discourse to social and cultural backgrounds to improve the students' comprehension and writing abilities, so as to arouse students'critical language awareness and improve students' critical reading ability. |
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