A Critical Discourse Analysis Of The U.S. And South Korea’s News Reports On North Korea Third Nuclear Test

On February12,2013, North Korea conducted the third nuclear test. Following the test, the news media in the U.S. and South Korea published a number of news reports. On the surface, those news reports seem to be objective and fair. To some extent, news reports play an important role in portraying national image, because they are backed by political groups and national power. Thus, different news media from different countries would be affected by different viewpoints.Usually, people’s knowledge of international issues is from international news reports. However, news reports are influenced by national interests so that they may consciously or unconsciously affect readers’understandings.Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA consists of the description level, interpretation level and explanation level. The description level focuses on the text analysis, which involves vocabulary, grammar, semantics and the sound system. This level is often studied by systemic functional grammar. The interpretation level studies the relationship between text and interaction, which regards the text as a process of production and a resource to interpret that certain text. At explanation level, relations between interaction and sociocultural context are discussed. At the same time, this level examines factors that determine the processes of production and interpretation of the news reports.In this thesis, Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA is adopted as the theoretical framework and SFG is selected as an analytic tool to examine the process of news production, interpretation and explanation levels. This thesis tries to make a critical discourse analysis of20English news reports from The Washington Post and USA Today of the U.S. and JoongAng Daily and Chosun Daily of South Korea.Through the appropriate combination of data explanation and theoretical analysis, this thesis is supposed to find out how the ideologies are embedded in the international political news reports, hoping to improve readers’critical consciousness, independent thinking and language sensitivity in the language learning process.