Customer Reviews

Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Introducing Qualitative Methods series)

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As a beginning student of CDA, I was pleased to read this volume, which almost serves as a personal valet welcoming one into this growing area of Linguistics. In a short and very readable book, we get the latest theories and methods in concise language that covers a lot of ground quickly. If you have read Titscher, Meyer, Wodak, and Vetter's "Methods of Text and Discourse Analysis" (Sage, 2000), you'll be relieved to see that this book is more focused and, for the most part, less technical. That's not to say that it's any less powerful, because the flip-side is that with this volume's emphasis only on CDA, we are reminded again and again of the ethical and emancipatory imperative of the CDA researcher.

Wodak herself introduces CDA's geneaology up to the present. Meyer then provides a concise discussion of methods, winding up his chapter with the admonition that CDA is not yet a unified discipline, but is nonetheless a constellation of approaches and methods that are likely approaching something resembling more of a singularity that at present - if more research is done in the field. Siegfried Jager's chapter on Discourse and Knowledge is a nice surprise from a lesser-known German analyst, who fortifies and corrects some of Foucault's conceptualizations about discourses and dispositifs and provides a trialectical model for looking at action, discourse, and manifestation. We then get a sound overview of Wodak's Historical CDA method and van Dijk's more social-cognitive method, followed by an overview of Fairclough's sociologically-oriented theory and Ron Scollon's micro-social critical discourse analysis.

The book is honest about CDA's "growth areas" and the criticisms it has received, and calls rather commonsensically for more research in order to shore up some of its weaknesses or areas that have not yet been fully explored. For the beginning researcher in CDA who is unsure about how to design his or her research proposal, this book provides solace via its characterization of CDA as hermeneutic rather than positivistic. In other words, there is always room for improvement.

The book provides a very clear view of all the directions in Critical Discourse Analysis, according to the different scholars.However, they all have in common, their concern with social inequalities and their aim to create awareness of injustice and abuse of power.
Text analysis serves the purpose of showing the relationship between language and power.
I highly recommend this book to those readers who are doing research into discourse analysis like myself.

As a good introduction to the field of critical discourse analysis, and its various aims, philosophies, and methods, this book is to be highly recommended. I particularly appreciated the examples - detailed and interesting, they are a tremendous aid in learning to use the methods covered.