Critical Discourse Analysis: Discovering Hidden Ideologies in News

Abstract

Nowadays, people usually start their everyday life with reading or listening the news.
Therefore, news has a crucial effect on shaping our worldviews. Hence, the present study is concentrated
on the news discourse to see how critically and consciously people, and especially the English language
learners read the news. Therefore, two groups of English language students were considered as the
participants. One of them was taught CDA principles of Van Dijk (1993), while the other group was not.
They were supposed to analyze two biased texts from BBC. The results demonstrated that the first group’s
analysis had no organized framework, and their pieces of evidence were weak to support their claims;
however, the second group, who was taught CDA principles, was more conscious of the writers’
tendency, and submitted some linguistic clues as the evidence of their claims. It was concluded that
learning CDA techniques is necessary for EFL learners, in order to raise their critical awareness about
the hidden ideologies of the news or media, in general.