A Critical Discourse Analysis Of President Obama’s Health Care Reform Speeches

Critical Discourse Analysis originates from critical linguistics and aims at uncovering the influence of ideology and power on discourse through the linguistic forms. Critical Discourse Analysis regards language as a kind of social practice and a part of social organization and social process. Critical Discourse Analysis takes Systemic-functional Grammar as its theoretical basis. Halliday’s Functional Grammar not only depicts the language structure of the discourse, but also explains why. Fairclough argued that any discourse contains three dimensions, that is, text, discursive practice (process of interaction) and social practice. Fairclough developed three stages of critical discourse analysis: description, to describe the formal properties of a text; interpretation, to interpret the relationship between the text and the process of interaction in which the text is constructed and transmitted; explanation, to explain the relationship between interaction and the social context.Based on the review of critical discourse analysis, the author studied President Obama’s speeches on health care reform by means of Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar and Fairclough’s three-dimensional mode. The thesis is an attempt to discover how President Obama strategically organized his public speeches to influence the attitudes and actions of his audience and what kind of role his language played in achieving his political goals.The author applied Fairclough’s three-dimensional model to analyze President Obama’s speeches. The analysis consists of three stages:description, interpretation and explanation. In the first stage, based on Halliday’s Systemic-functional Grammar, the author described the formal language features of the speeches from the aspect of three metafunctions. In the second stage, the author tried to interpret how these language features were produced by means of answering three questions:’What is going on in President Obama’s speeches’,’who is involved and what is the relationship between them’ and’what is the function of language in what is going on’. Last, the author explored the social context and social determinants of the discourse and explained how the president gained support from the audience.It can be seen from the analysis that Barack Obama applied various language skills and strategies to propagandize his health reform plan successfully and won support from the audience. He applied different processes to inform his audience of what his health reform was and why American people needed such a reform. In addition, President Obama used various mood, modality words and personal pronouns to establish close relationship between his audience and him so as to gain support from them. The language forms that President Obama used depend on his ideology, power, and political purposes. In political speeches, the speaker would make full use of various linguistic devices in a conscious way to influence and even control the audience’s attitudes and actions, so readers should make in-depth analysis to uncover the way that the speaker uses language to convey his values and ideology and exercises the power to help achieve his political intentions. Only through the critical thinking and analysis can readers discover real purpose of political speeches, why speech producers organize their speeches in that way and this kind of research will help improve critical language awareness. Language teachers should guide students to see through the language to the essence.