Critical Discourse Analysis Of Listening Conversations In College English Test-Band Four

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was initiated in the1970s, which aims atrevealing the potential relationship between language, power and ideology throughthe realization of language. In the opinion of critical linguists, no discourse isabsolutely objective, but more or less affected by ideology or other social factors. Byemploying Fairclough‘s Three-Dimensional Model, that is the modal of description,interpretation and explanation, the paper explores how the conversations in thelistening part of College English Test-Band Four (CET-4) represents ideologiesthrough the use of language.In descriptive stage, the main focuses of this thesis are mood and modalitysystem. In interpretative stage, contents, relations, subject positions andpresupposition are analyzed. In explanative stage, the thesis explains the ideologiesthat reflected in the listening conversations of the CET-4from institutional andsocietal perspectives.As for the research methods, this paper adopts both qualitative analysis andquantitative analysis. The qualitative analysis is used to reveal the ideology hidden inthe listening conversations. Quantitative analysis is mainly employed to analyze thelanguage features, such as mood and modality. As for the data collection, this papercollects all together ten past tests of the CET-4from June,2008to December,2012.Each test has ten conversations in the listening part; therefore, there are totally onehundred conversations.The study finds that like any discourse in general, CET-4is never a neutralinstrument for measuring the English comprehensive application ability of collegestudents, but ideologically invested.