Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports On Ye Shiwen’s Performance In London Olympics In The Guardian

Critical linguistics, also termed critical discourse analysis, is an instrumental subject on discourse analysis initially arising in British schools in the late1970s. It aims to examine the ideology encoded in the linguistic representations and to uncover the complicated relationship among language, power and ideology by detecting the linguistic features and the wider social-historical context. As a non-literary discourse, media discourse is extremely popular with the critical discourse analysis. A survey of the previous studies shows that former studies generally focus on media discourses that are obviously open to ideologically-embedded meaning, such as news reports on political events, racial discrimination, gender discrimination, etc. while other seemingly more "neutral" news genres, for instance sports news, are still not paid enough attention to. Therefore, this dissertation chooses sports news as the object of study with an attempt to broaden the range of news discourse analysis. Within the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, this research will analyze the news reports on Ye Shiwen’s performance in London2012Olympic Games collected from the British newspaper The Guardian. The questions of the research include:Are these news reports value-free? If not, how are they ideologically encoded? Do the invested ideologies change from the beginning to the end and what changes take place? What are the relationships between the changes and the broader social context.The research will take Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the theoretical framework. The former views every instance of language use as consisting of three levels:text, discursive practice and social practice. On the level of text, transitivity system put forward by Halliday’s systemic functional grammar is employed as the tool to analyze the linguistic features of texts both qualitatively and quantitatively. On the level of discursive practice, the sources and modes of the discourse representations are respectively examined to show the production of media discourse. On the level of social practice, the broader social context will be investigated to provide a tentative account for the choice of linguistic representations and the ideologies encoded.Our analysis shows that though the reporters strive to be neutral and objective when reporting Ye Shiwen’s gold-winning performance on London2012, the news reports are still far from value-free. Their attitude towards Ye Shiwen has undergone several subtle changes in the course of the whole event. In the earlier period, the questioning voices are tacitly permitted by the reporters, whose attitude is explicitly shown. While in the later period, this attitude becomes moderate or even positive, but there still exist voices of query. What is more essential, the reporting focus in this period goes unduly to the reaction of China’s side. It seems to give readers an impression that Chinese people are so sensitive that they overreact on this event. In addition, unlike the earlier period, the reporters in this period eager to distance from the questioning side and tend to emphasize the confliction between China and the US. In this sense, the questioning role of the British media is hidden, showing the hint to please the Chinese people. The ideologies invested in the news reports as well as the changes, cannot be analyzed without the social context. The factors including the world order in the pool is broken, the rapid arising of China provokes the jealousness and discontent of the west, and the difference of the national interests, account for the production of these news reports.Therefore, the seemingly neutral news reports on sports are not as neutral and objective as they often seem and frequently assert. Instead, they are inevitably influenced by ideological stances of the reporters and restricted by the social context. Theoretically, the research proves that the analysis conducted within the framework of critical discourse analysis is effective to unmask the hidden ideology in linguistic representation and to examine news discourse. Practically, it has some significant implications for language teaching, especially for English teaching, in that it will be of great help to raise English learners’ critical language awareness and language sensitivity.