Critical Discourse Analysis: Scrutinizing Ideologically-Driven Discourses

Abstract

C ritical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been used as a basic discipline in education to provide answers to questions about the relationships between language, society, power, identity, ideology, politics, and culture. Van Dijk (1997) being a leading figure of this field, has defined critical discourse studies as a new multidisciplinary discipline for the analysis of text and talk in the humanities and social sciences. CDA aims at examining the dominant culture in a society to discover the mechanisms that have made that culture dominant, and to criticize of those mechanisms. The utmost objective of any CDA study is to unravel the underlying hidden agenda which is left implicit in the discourse. This paper aims to provide a concise overview about CDA, its definit ion, and some CDA frameworks. In this regard, four basic CDA frameworks proposed by Van Leeuwen, Van Dijk, Hodge and Kress, and Faircalough have been presented. (Mohammad Javad Riasati, Forough Rahimi. Critical Discourse Analysis: Scrutinizing Ideologica lly - Driven Discourses. Rep Opinion 2014;6(7): 77 - 81 ). (ISSN: 1553 - 9873). http://www.sciencepub.net/report . 11