Critical Discourse Analysis in Education
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CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS IN EDUCATION
INTRODUCTION: THE EMERGENCE OF CRITICAL D I S C O U R S E A N A LY S I S I N E D U C AT I O N A L RESEARCH
Education researchers from around the globe have turned to critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a way to describe, interpret, and explain important educational problems. CDA is an interdisciplinary set of theoretical and analytic tools applied to the study of the relationships between texts (spoken, written, multimodal, and digital), discourse practices (communicative events), and social practices (society-wide processes) (Blommaert and Bulcaen, 2000; Collins, 2004; Fairclough, 1993; Luke, 1995/1996). Luke (2002) defines CDA as a “a principled and transparent shunting back and forth between the microanalysis of texts using various tools of linguistic, semiotic, and literary analysis of social formations, institutions, and power relations that these texts index and construct” (p. 100). CDA focuses on how language as a cultural tool mediates relationships of power and privilege in social interactions, institutions, and bodies of knowledge. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S : D I F F E R E N T S C H O O L S OF THOUGHTS
Critical discourse studies stem from overlapping intellectual traditions, each emphasizing the linguistic turn in the social sciences. CDA is a particular strand of Critical Discourse Studies. It is a problem oriented and trans-disciplinary theory and method that draws from different schools of thought. Fairclough (1992) has referred to CDA as a textually-oriented form of discourse analysis (TODA). To develop this textual analysis, Fairclough brought together the linguistic theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Hasan, 1989; Halliday, 1985) with the social theory of discourse as it evolved in the work of Foucault (1969/1972, 1979, 1981). Systemic functional linguistics (SFL) offered a meaning based alternative to autonomous models of syntax and a means to build a theory of language as a social semiotic. From these developments in language theory sprang Critical Linguistics, (CDA) and later Critical
M. Martin-Jones, A. M. de Mejia and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 3: Discourse and Education, 53–68. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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REBECCA ROGERS
language awareness1 (Fairclough, 2003; Luke, 1995/1996; Pennycook, 2001). A number of books draw on SFL within a CDA framework; Discourse and Social Change (Fairclough, 1993); Classroom Discourse Analysis (Christie, 2002); Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change (Young and Harrison, 2004), and The Language of Schooling: A Functional Linguistics Perspective (Schleppegrell, 2004). In the early 1990s a group of European scholars (Fairclough, Kress, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, and Wodak) spent two days at a symposium in Amsterdam discussing theories and methods specific to CDA. These scholars came from somewhat diverse academic backgrounds, and CDA reflects their interdisciplinary approach (
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