Discourse And Social Change--An Analysis Of Articles Dedicated To The Promotion Of Privatization Of Chinese Education

The privatization of education is still a relatively new thing in China. It remains an issue to get this idea and a series of accompanying new ideas accepted. Discourse analysis serves as a useful tool in studying how new ideas and concepts manage to gain people's acceptance.Based on Fairclough's theory of discourse and social change and drawing on several other relevant theories, this thesis targets on articles promoting the privatization of education in China. Special emphasis is put on how discursive stability is achieved with an eye to explaining how new ideology is introduced through discourse and eventually brings about tangible social change.This thesis selected 20 articles promoting the privatization of Chinese education and made a detailed analysis of such linguistic features as modality, hedging, progressive aspect and presupposition in the following three types of claims, namely claims about the influence of Chinese private schools on society and existing education structure, claims about the influence Chinese private schools have on teachers and students, and the definitional claims of Chinese non-public schools. Results show that the authors of these articles use a much higher frequency of modality, hedging, progressive aspect and presupposition in the first two types of claims, which verifies the presupposition that these articles use modality, hedging and the progressive aspect to create strategic ambiguity that is resolved through presuppositions that reflect the new ideas and concepts. By doing so, the author of this thesis intends to 'explore the relationship between discourse and social change and touch upon the ways how social change is brought about discursively. Some useful suggestions are also provided for similar studies as well as the conducting of such articles.