Week 5: What is Critical Discourse Analysis

EDUC2029

Quick review

Identify: Process, Participant, Circumstance1. We own every little bush, every little tree.2. On 10 July four men approached the British

in a small canoe fitted with outriggers.

Answers

We own every little bush, every little tree.

Participant Process: doing Participant

On 10 July

four men approached the British in a small canoe fitted with outriggers

Circ: when

Participant

Process: doing

Participant Circumstance: how (?)

A quick review

• Critical Discourse Analysis• Discourse

What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)?

MacLure (2003)• Allan Luke (1995): ‘one of the main tasks of

discourse analysis is to ‘disarticulate’ the texts of everyday life as a way of ‘disrupting common sense’ about the naturalness or inevitability of identities, values and concepts, thus showing the workings of power and material interests in the most seemingly innocent of texts.’ (p9)

What is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)?

MacLure (2003)• ‘A discourse-based educational research

would set itself the work of taking that which offers itself as common-sensical, obvious, natural, given or unquestionable, and trying to unravel it a bit – to open it up to further questioning.’ (p9)

Gee’s notion of Discourse

In simple terms: An identity kit which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognise.

Gee’s notion of Discourse

Gee continued: ‘Club membership’ – there are ways of displaying (through words, actions, values and beliefs) membership in a particular social group or social network (people who associate with each other around a common set of interests, goals and activities)

Sanctions exist of you ‘break’ the rules.

Janks (1997)

‘Ideology* is at its most powerful when it is invisible, when discourses have been naturalised and become part of our everyday commonsense.’ (p341)

*shared values, beliefs, assumptions and theories

Aim

• To further explore what it means to do a Critical Discourse Analysis

• To consider the relationship between grammatical form and meaning

• To introduce more tools, especially Theme and Mood

Outline• Review of CDA and Discourse• Fairclough’s approach to CDA• The Janks questions• Back to school: practising basic CDA• Some issues with CDA• Grammar: form v meaning• Theme• Mood• Tutorial

MacLure (2003)

“The linguistic turn has insisted that truths are textual; that the way we see the world is ‘always already’ infected by language.’” (p7)

Fairclough’s dimension of discourse and discourse analysis

Fairclough’s dimension of discourse and discourse analysis

Description: what does it look like? (text analysis)

Explanation: why is it this way? (social analysis)

Interpretation: what does it all mean? (processing analysis)

Janks’s questions (1997, p329)

• How is the text positioned or positioning?• Whose interests are served by this

positioning?• Whose interest are negated?• What are the consequences of this

positioning?

Back to school…

• High School Musical• Donnie Darko

Janks (1997)

• Estrangement and engagement (with and against the text)

‘Engagement without estrangement is a form of submission to the power of the text regardless of the reader’s own positions. Estrangement without engagement is a refusal to leave the confines of one’s own subjectivity, a refusal to allow otherness to enter.’ (p331)

Wilhelm (2007)

‘Once students understand a text on the author’s terms, they are free to dispute the expressed meaning, resist or transform it in some way. This is the kind of conversation that brings into play both respect and resistance, and that is so vital to democratic thinking and living.’

Janks (1997)

‘What I am ultimately looking for are patterns that I can use to establish hypotheses about discourses at work in society. I then try to confirm or disconfirm these hypotheses by looking for other related texts.’ (p331)

‘The strength of CDA is that the different dimensions of analysis that it offers provide the means both for producing research questions and analysing data.’ (p341)

Before we move on to grammar…

a word of critique about CDA

Jim Martin on Positive Discourse Analysis (PDA)

‘instead of heartening accounts of progress we get discouraging analyses of oppression…this means that when we come to design better futures we simply don’t have enough information to move forward. Deconstruction is helpful, but not enough on its own…we do need to move beyond a preoccupation with demonology, beyond a singular focus on semiosis in the service of abusive power – and reconsider power communally as well, as it circulates through communities, as they re-align around values, and renovate discourses that enact a better world…’

Grammar: Form and Meaning

James Gee (1990)

Grammar = Form

“Any human language is made up, like a set of Chinese boxes, of units within units (like boxes within boxes), and these units are not defined primarily by their meanings, but by their formal properties.”

See Chapter 4 of Gee, J. (1990). Social Linguistics and literacies: ideology in Discourses. London: The Falmer Press.

Illustration of Form v Meaning

Process Participant CircumstanceGet it on.

Grammatically, “Get it on” is”• a clause• Mood is imperative; that is, it is written as a command

Form

Illustration of Form v Meaning

Process Participant CircumstanceGet it onPlace a prophylactic onWear protection

• Who would say each of these?• Who would never say any of these?• Is something missing? Why?

Developing a metalanguage (Part 2)

Some more grammar tools to use for CDA…

Developing a metalanguage

Theme and rheme

Theme“We may assume that in all languages the clause has the

character of a message: it has some form of organization giving it the status of a communicative event. But there are different ways in which this may be achieved. In English…the clause is organized as a message by having a special status assigned to one part of it. One element in the clause is enunciated as the theme; this then combines with the remainder so that the two parts together constitute a message.” (Halliday, 1985)

Theme

“…the Theme can be identified as that element which comes in the first position in the clause…(it) is the starting point for the message; it is what the clause is going to be about. So part of the meaning of any clause lies in which element is chosen as its Theme… (Halliday, 1985)

Theme

Commonly, the first element is the:• Participant or• Process or• Circumstance.

Theme

Participant as Theme: “Frodo looked out eastward and gazed at the tall island. Its sides sprang sheer out of the running water.”

Process as Theme: “Curse you and all Halflings to death and darkness.”

Circumstance as Theme: “In this matter I cannot advise you.”

[Examples from: J. R. R. Tolkien (2001). Lord of the rings: fellowship of the ring. Hammersmith, London: HarperCollins Publishers.]

Theme and Rheme

“…Theme represents ‘This is what I’m talking about’ and Rheme is ‘This is what I’m saying about it’…the Theme looks backwards, relating the current message to what has gone before. The Rheme points both backwards and forwards by picking up on information which is already available and by presenting information which was not there before.” (Gerot & Wignell, 1995)

Theme and Rheme

“Frodo looked out eastward and gazed at the tall island. Its sides sprang sheer out of the running water. High up above the tall cliffs were steep slopes upon which trees climbed, mounting one head upon another; and above them again were grey faces of inaccessible rock, crowned by a great spire of stone.”

Theme and Rheme

Frodo looked out eastward and gazed at the tall island.

Its sides sprang sheer out of the running water.

High up above the tall cliffs were steep slopes

Theme and Rheme

Frodo gazed at the tall island.

Theme Rheme

Its sides sprang sheer out of the running water.

Theme Rheme

High up above the tall cliffs were steep slopes

Theme Rheme

Theme and Rheme: Old and NewAnother way of putting all of this is that the:• Theme contains the “old” information• Rheme contains the “new” information.

“Once information has been presented in a text it is then available to be developed. Information can either be picked up as Theme or it can be accumulated as New.” (Gerot & Wignell, 1995)

Think about relationship to notemaking…

Theme and Text• The topic sentence of a paragraph is a Theme.• The first paragraph of an expository text (e.g. essay) is

the Theme.• The first chapter of a novel could also be considered a

Theme.

Remember: Theme … “is the starting point for the message; it is what the clause (or paragraph or essay or novel) is going to be about.” (words in brackets added)

Mood

Mood

Mood Type of question

Declarative (indicative) Statement, e.g. I like that hat.

Interrogative Question, e.g. Do you like my hat?

Imperative Command, e.g. Get my hat!

Mood

If it’s cold, you could get someone to close a window using a command, e.g.

Close the window!

What does this suggest about the power relationships?

With a neighbour, work out how to get someone to close a window by using a:

• Statement• Question

More CDA tools…

• See Reading 10: Norman Fairclough

Tutorial

• Reviewing Participant, Process, Circumstance• Noun Group exercise• A simple CDA using the grammar – school

history books

ReferencesGee, J. (1990). Social Linguistics and literacies: ideology in Discourses.

London: The Falmer Press. Gerot, L. & Wignell, P. (1995). Making sense of functional grammar.

AEE publishing: QueenslandHalliday, M.A.K. (1985). An introduction to functional grammar.

Arnold: UK Janks, H. (1997). Critical discourse analysis as a research tool.

Discourse: studies in the cultural politics of education. 18 (3). pp329-342.

MacLure, M. (2003). Discourse in educational and social research. Buckingham: Open University Press.

Wilhelm, J. (2007). Engaging readers and writers with enquiry: promoting deep understanding in Language Arts and the content areas with guiding questions. Sydney :Scholastic.