With the development of China’s economics, politics and military, the position of China in the world is improving gradually. China’s education, as the foundation of the country, has attracted more and more attention from the whole world. It has been several years Since China takes effect the basic education reform. So the present paper chooses14news reports about Chinese basic education reform in the recent years from both America and China as the research samples, and analyzes the samples from critical discourse analysis (CDA) to show whether there are differences in the two countries’ news reports. It aims to reveal the relationship between the language, ideology and power.Since the birth of critical discourse analysis, it has received a lot of attention from the scholars. It is used to various kinds of discourses, such as mass media, academic writing, novels, poetries and so on. Nowadays, CDA is more and more applied to the mass media discourses, including news reports, political speeches, official documents, etc. The news report is a main way for people to acquire information to know more about the world, and it has great influence on people’s attitudes towards certain things. America is one of the most powerful countries, and its media has great influence in the world. So America’s news reports are very important for a country to shape and spread its image. Most of the previous researches are about political or economical news, only few are about educational news. Thus, this paper chooses Chinese news reports and American news on Chinese education reform as the research samples to do contrastive analysis.The samples are selected from the official websites of the two countries. Among the American news reports, some reports from New York Times and others from CNN. While among the Chinese reports, some are from China Daily and others are from CCTV. Under the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, this paper is based on Fairclough’s three dimensional modes, and chooses Halliday’s systemic-functional grammar as the analytical tool. It aims to reveal the hidden relationship between news reports language and ideology as well as power through the contrastive analysis. Through the analysis it finds out that some power relations and ideologies are tend to exist in news reports. The purposes of news repots are not only to provide the latest information to readers, but also to influence the readers’ideologies and at last even to control the readers’ ideologies through reading.The present paper is divided into five parts. Chapter One is the introduction of the research background, objectivity and significance. Chapler Two is the literature review. It has reviewed the critical discourse analysis researched by international and domestic scholars, and the CDA study on news reports both domestic and overseas. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation and analytical tools. The theoretical foundation is Fairclough’s three dimensional models, and based on this theory, it chooses transitivity, modality and thematic choice as the analytical tools. Chapter Four is the analysis part. It separately analyzes the titles and main bodies of the Chinese seven news reports and American seven news reports. It uses the transitivity of ideational function, modality of interpersonal function and thematic choice of textual function as analytical tools, to reveal the features of language in news reports and the relations between language and ideology. Chapter Five is the conclusion. It summarizes the main findings of this paper and the limitations in the paper. |