A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis Of The 2010 Uk Student Fees Protests

News media have tended to be digitalized and diversified. In light of the previous studies of news discourse, most scholars take the perspectives of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Discourse Studies, and try to integrate them to a much degree. In this thesis, a combined perspective of Multimodal Critical Discourse Studies (MCDS) will be introduced to discuss how to interpret the multimodal symbols, so as to acquire an in-depth and more systematic understanding of a social issue.Students’ protests have been continually considered by most of the British media a hot issue about politics and sociology. The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, as two main local newspapers across UK, generally stick to the different stances towards this, and the richer multimodal resources can be retrieved through their corresponding news websites, theguardian.com and telegraph.co.uk.As a result, this thesis studies the typical ones from a series of UK student fees protests in 2010, and the data were collected online, including eight in-depth reports with more than 400 words in each, and the photographs of the participants which either appear within the texts or link to the related photo galleries. On the basis of van Leeuwen’s theoretical system of’representation of social actors’, as well as Hallidayan theory of transitivity, this thesis attempts to examine how the social actors (the student protesters and the police) of the protests were linguistically and visually constructed through the online news of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.By analyzing the referential strategies of social actors and transitivity of their actions, the degree of violence can be evaluated. In general, The Guardian describes the protesters as the actors with the tendency to be violent, and takes a mediate negative attitude towards them. However, The Daily Telegraph describes the protesters as the victims and condemns their violence. Furthermore, by establishing the mapping relationship between images and texts, a higher relevance between the different representations can be witnessed. In addition, the news frames of each newspaper towards the students’ protests can also be enriched from the perspective of multimodality, which may benefit to the systematic analysis of the other conflict events and contribute to a future development of news reports.