Critical Discourse Analysis Of College English Newspaper-reading

CDA, as an instrumental linguistics, was proposed by Fowler, et al. in the 1970s. Its basic tenet is that discourse (language in use) is not neutral, objective but ideologically loaded. Its purpose is to reveal the relations among language, ideology and society through the analysis of linguistic features.College English Newspaper-reading is a course set for junior or senior students of English. The content of teaching is concerned with political, economical, military, cultural, disaster, etc. news from the newspapers. Introducing and applying CDA during the teaching news will be beneficial to cultivate and improve students'critical language awareness. This thesis adopts Fairclough's three-dimension model and Halliday's Systemic Function Grammar as the theory framework to make critical analysis of hard news. Based on the theory framework, 60 hard news reports are chosen, from which the linguistic features easily affected by ideology are selected to be used as analytical tools for hard news, such as lexis, transitivity, transformation, modality, and intertextuality. From the analysis of these five aspects, we can achieve to reveal the hidden ideology through the analysis of linguistic structures.This thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One is the"introduction", introducing the research background, research questions, data collection and organization of the thesis. Chapter Two is the"literature review", reviewing the previous studies of CDA abroad and at home and explaining the related notions. Chapter Three is the"theoretical basis"for the sample analysis, explaining Fairclough's three-dimension model and Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, based on which analytical tools for critical analyzing hard news are suggested.Chapter Four is the main body of the thesis, focusing on critical analysis of selected five hard news reports by the application of suggested tools in Chapter Three. The findings from the analysis of samples will be of benefit to improve the strategy and methods of teaching newspapers. In this chapter, the author chooses five hard news reports which are about the Communist Party of China, the relationship between America and Iran, the connection of Chinese economy to the world's for detailed critical analysis, the results of which show that language in hard news embeds ideology which shapes and determines the linguistic structures, and that by analyzing such linguistic features as lexis, transitivity, modality, passivization, nominalization, modes of discourse representation, news sources, the hidden ideology can be uncovered.Chapter Five is the conclusion of the thesis. The thesis is summarized and the limitations are given. At the same time, some suggestions are also presented for the future research.It is hoped that this thesis will offer an introduction to the basic information of CDA by which hard news will be analyzed, and that some inspirations for College English Newspaper-reading course will be grasped. Thus the theoretical significance of this thesis is offering a new method of analyzing hard news discourse by which the hidden ideology can be revealed through analyzing linguistic forms. The practical significance is that CDA is attempted to be introduced into the teaching of College English Newspaper-reading, which will be helpful to solve the current problems in teaching and improve learners'critical language awareness.