A Contrastive Study On Critical Discourse Analysis Of Educational News Between China And America

Critical discourse analysis (CDA), a recent school of discourse analysis (CDA) with a cross-disciplinary background of linguistics, psychology, sociology, and media studies etc, has drawn increasing academic attentions in the latest two decades. A purpose of CDA is to reveal the dialectical relationship between the ideology and the texts in which it is embedded. So far, most of the CDA studies take non-literary texts, for instance news report, as their data for analysis. Few studies, however, have been carried out specifically on educational news reports. The present thesis, from the perspective of ideational metafunction, analyzes educational news reports collected from Chinese and American newspapers. Based on comparative analysis of the educational news reports from China and the US, it attempts to reveal how the media constructs its image by using different linguistic tools, and to explore the relationship between this constructing models and the complicated social cultural contexts, and eventually the unhidden ideology behind the social news reports.The theoretical framework of the thesis is based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar. At the textual level, a qualitative analysis was conducted by using analytical tools of ideational metafunction, such as transitivity, classification and transformation. This is to explore the textual features of news reports and reveal the ideology embedded in the text of educational news.A detailed analysis of the educational news reports leads to the conclusion that:news report as a product of social practice, inspite of being claimed as objective and fair, is inevitably influenced by ideology. The choice of language is the product of special ideology and social relations. Its theoretical significance lies in the fact that the study not only demonstrates the correctness and rationality of the CDA and SFG (though Fairclough’s three dimensional model is a little bit ambiguous and lack of concrete steps to follow), but also reveals the ideology embedded in the text of educational news. The cultural contrast appears as a series of conflicts in ideology, system, idea, behavior, custom and their mixed conflicts. The conclusions are summarized as follow:1) Curriculum. Western education embodies the freedom of education, whereas Chinese education reflects the ethical spirit of tradition.2) Methodology. Western education advocates scientific rationality and experimental spirit, whereas Chinese education emphasizes on moral awareness and formed tradition.3) Ideal personality. Western education puts emphasis on the development of individual personality and the pursuit of personal freedom independence, whereas Chinese education holds a social standard, emphasizes on the creation of group personality.4) Humanity and educational functions. Western educators pay attention to people’s rationality, whereas Chinese educators pay attention to people’s morality.The present thesis is practically significant in that it may promote students’ ability of critical reading, increase their awareness of the anti-control in news media, provide feasible suggestions for teaching methods and personnel training model of thinking, help learners avoid being manipulated or misled by seemingly objective and neutral news reports. Therefore, this study carries certain instructive effects on teaching practice.