A Critical Study Of Chinese And Foreign Newspapers’ Reports About2011China’s Train Collision

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) emerged as a new method of discourse analysis in the1980s. It aims to expose the ideologies invested by reporters in discourses through the analysis of language features in discourses and the context in which the discourse is produced. After its birth, critical discourse analysis is widely used to analyze news discourses, especially political and economic news. There are few studies of disaster news, especially studies of public transportations, so the present study serves as a supplement to critical discourse analysis.Employing Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar (SFG) as the analytical tool, the present study, under the framework of Fairclough’s three-dimensional model, conducts a contrastive analysis of twenty news reports (respectively5from each newspaper) about China’s train collision on July23rd in2011from New York Times, The Times, People’s Daily and China Daily for the purpose of identifying differences between Chinese and foreign newspapers’reports about the collision and exploring causes for the different reporting. The contrastive analysis is conducted at three stages. At the description stage, language features of the sample reports are analyzed from the perspective of transitivity, lexical classification and modality. At the interpretation stage, news source and discourse representation are employed to account for processes of production and consumption of the texts. At the final stage, the explanation stage, the author explores causes for the differences embodied at the description stage and the interpretation stage from the perspective of society, culture and history.After the contrastive analysis, the present study finds out that there are many differences between the four newspapers’reports about the train collision. Reports in New York Times and The Times do not present the collision objectively and impartially but exaggerate and distort the reality of the event, which actually depicts a negative image of China. Reports of People s Daily and China Daily present readers the positive aspects of Chinese government and Chinese individuals, which portrays a positive image of China. All these differences prove that disaster news reports, especially that of public transportation, are not as neutral as people traditionally regard. This kind of reports can also be filled with ideologies and be employed by western media to exert their ideologies on readers.The present study, to some extent, can serve as a supplement to critical discourse analysis. It also proves the fact that Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar are effective in analyzing news discourses from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. The most important implication is that the present study enlightens language teachers and experts of teaching materials about the importance of the cultivation of students’critical thinking and critical reading ability in the course of teaching and writing teaching materials, which can gradually foster their critical language awareness.