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Critical Discourse Analysis in Applied Linguistics: A Methodological Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2014

Angel Lin
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Abstract

The critical turn arrived in the field of applied linguistics in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the field has since witnessed a burgeoning body of literature drawing on a variety of analytical frameworks and methodological approaches that are loosely labeled as critical discourse analysis (CDA). A methodological review of the role of CDA in the field is thus timely both to provide signposts for researchers wishing to draw on CDA methods in applied linguistics research and to provide some theoretical and methodological resources to evaluate the rapidly growing body of CDA-oriented applied linguistics research. Unlike some methodological tools, such as corpus analytic tools that can be inserted into a diverse range of theoretical frameworks (e.g., positivist studies, interpretive studies, critical studies), CDA cannot be applied divorced from its paradigmatic theories, as it is closely related to a specific set of social theories about the nature of language, literacy, identity, social practice, and the social world. CDA methods thus cannot be applied without also a concomitant commitment to CDA's theoretical orientations. In this review, the theoretical commitments as well as the classic methods of CDA will first be discussed and then the major areas in which CDA researchers typically conduct their studies are outlined together with a review of the variety of methodological approaches used in these different areas. The strengths as well as the limitations of these approaches will be discussed with examples of recent studies using CDA in the field of applied linguistics. The article will conclude with some suggestions for future directions of CDA methodological development.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual Review of Applied Linguistics , Volume 34 , March 2014 , pp. 213 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bhatia, V. K., Flowerdew, J., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.). (2008). Advances in discourse studies (pp. 233–244). London, UK: Routledge.

This collection contains articles by Ron Scollon and Rodney Jones on how to use the notion of discourse itineraries to critically analyze the circulation of texts, practices, bodies, and objects and trace their evolving trajectories. It also contains other useful articles for CDA researchers including John Flowerdew's review article on CDA and Vijay Bhatia's article on critical genre analysis, among others, which can offer useful frameworks for CDA researchers.

Lin, A. M. Y. (2013). Critical discourse analysis: Overview. In Chapelle, C. A. (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1466–1471). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

This article provides an overview of the historical development of CDA and the major areas of work and contribution of CDA studies in applied linguistics.

Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. (2009). Methods of critical discourse analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

This collection offers a comprehensive methodological introduction to the frameworks and methods used by key CDA researchers (Teun van Dijk, Ruth Wodak, and Norman Fairclough). It also contains chapters detailing corpus-based methods and multimodality analysis methods and how they can be fruitfully applied to CDA.

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