ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines some key aspects of critical thinking and pedagogical Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). It explores a number of issues and challenges with these traditions. The chapter highlights a number of challenges with both critical thinking and pedagogical CDA for the analysis of written arguments. Critical thinking refers to the learning of techniques to improve our capacities to evaluate arguments effectively. Traditional pedagogical CDA has been trained on media and political texts, including political arguments, where the analytical focus is the rhetorical rather than logical dimension. CDA is the practical investigation of how language use may affirm and indeed reproduce the perspectives, values and ways of talking of the relatively powerful, which may not be in the interests of the socially/economically relatively powerless. The advantages of using big data have been exploited in CDA for the last 10-15 years.
