Critical Discourse Analysis Of Ideology Embedded In The News Discourse About Territorial Dispute

In recent years, territorial dispute, an issue gaining global concern, has been widely covered by news media. The seemingly objective and impartial news discourse actually embeds a certain ideology, which will exert a subtle influence on the formation of public ideology. Thus, it is of great significance to guide the audience to enhance its critical consciousness and improve its sensitivity towards the power and ideology hidden in the news discourse.Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) aims to reveal the relationship between language, power and ideology. It provides the analytical approaches to studying ideology embedded in the news discourse. CDA was first proposed by Roger Fowler as Critical Linguistics (CL) in the book Language and Control in1979. So far, western researchers have brought forward a series of approaches to conduct critical analysis of discourses. In China, many scholars have shown an increasing attention on CDA and adopt it to analyze different discourses. However, few of them have conducted studies on news discourse about territorial dispute from the perspective of CDA.Based on Halliday’s SFL theory and Fairclough’s Three-Dimensional Approach, this thesis analyzes news discourses about Russo-Japanese territorial dispute. The samples are extracted from Pravda, Asahi Shimbun, VOA, China Daily and BBC. Through the description of text, the interpretation of the relationship between text and discursive practice and the explanation of that between discursive practice and social practice, the thesis reveals the linguistic strategies utilized in these news discourses and the ideologies embedded in them. The thesis also suggests some implications for English teaching and learning.The study finds that news media adopt different processes of transitivity system and modal operators of modality system when reporting territorial dispute. The usage of neutral, commendatory and derogatory vocabulary varies in news discourses as well. News media employ the mentioned linguistic strategies above to embed their ideology and political stance in the seemingly impartial and objective news discourses by stressing different contents, subjects, relations and connections. Therefore, audience should be fully aware of the linguistic strategies adopted in news discourse. They are also supposed to develop the critical consciousness of interpreting news discourse and enhance the capacity of anti-dominating ideologies of news media. In addition, English Teachers should cultivate students’critical consciousness and their ability of using language flexibly in specific social context.