| The controversy on the exchange rate of Chinese currency between U.S. andChina has been intensified since the financial crisis in2008. Some American scholarsand economists claim that the financial crisis is originated from China because theChinese government artificially controls the value of RMB (renminbi, the Chinesecurrency) to gain unfair trade surplus in international markets. While China denies theallegation of currency manipulator and states that the financial crisis is caused by theover-consuming and over-borrowing of the Americans and the dispute is actually astrategy of the Americans shifting public attentions of domestic economy depressionand social problems. Thus, the media coverage on the issue of RMB is alwaysemerging in the two countries’ newspapers. In order to unmask the underneathideologies of theses coverage and study how these ideologies are presented as normalmedia discourse as well as function their special impact on readers, the present thesisis conducted to make a contrastive critical discourse analysis on the news of theappreciation of RMB between the American and Chinese media reports, by applyingthe theoretical framework of Three-Dimensional Model by Fairclough underpinned byHalliday’s Systemic-Functional Grammar and corpus linguistics.The thesis collects news reports on the appreciation of RMB from the mainmedia of the two countries to build two mini-corpora. Through the corpus tools, thepresent study presents clearly the language patterns in the two corpora for furtherqualitative analyses. The qualitative analysis is to employ Faircolugh’sThree-dimensional Model to make a critical analysis on the news discourse, followingthe three steps: text analysis, discursive analysis and social practice analysis, so as todelve into the ideologies between the news lines, try to answer the following questions:(1) What are the similarities and differences between the reports on theappreciation of Chinese currency between the two countries’ media?(2) What kind ofimplied ideologies are implanted in the related news reports when we refer to theperspective of critical discourse analysis?(3) What are the pedagogical implicationsof the approach employed by the present research?Through the contrastive analysis, the following implications can be concluded:(1) the news discourses of the two countries are the carriers of the ideologies actually.The language patterns and the word-generating skills and courses, such as the lexicalchoice, modal system and collocation, are all decided by the functions, the values andthe ideologies the news reports want to transmit;(2) the American media is prone tochoose the aggressive, negative expressions, behind which is the unfriendly, opponentand uncooperative attitude, full of hegemony and cold-war thinking. While most ofthe Chinese reports present that China is at a defendant stance, showing a tolerateattitude which is seeking cooperation meanwhile keeping its stance and the ideologiesto seek common development and friendly cooperation for mutual benefit;(3) thepresent contrastive study of media discourse provides a theoretical foundation for thetransplantation of critical awareness in language teaching and newspaper reading.The practical significance and enlightenment of the present study lie on:(1) It ishelpful for the reinforcement of the reader’ s critical reading awareness and theimprovement of their critical reading ability;(2) For the news reporters, facing withthe foreign media, they should be sensitive to the underneath ideologies, hold thediscourse power to deal with the world opinion;(3) It is suggested that the Englishteachers should cultivate the students’ critical awareness in their language study. |
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