ABSTRACT
Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a set of theories and methods that have been widely used in literacy research to study the relationships between discourse processes and social structures. The critical study of discourse has a long history and can be traced to philosophers and theorists such as Bakhtin (1981), DuBois (1903/1990) and Pecheux (1975). Bringing together decades of scholarship in critical discourse traditions, a group of scholars (Fairclough, Kress, van Dijk, van Leeuwen, Wodak) gathered in the early 1990s for a symposium in Amsterdam to discuss theories and methods specific to CDA. What resulted was a more formalized tradition of CDA, still diverse and interdisciplinary, but having enough commonalities to be taken up in a variety of disciplines, including literacy studies. CDA in literacy research grew out of the work of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and cultural and media studies. Schools, classrooms and literacy practices have been looked to as sites for studying not only the micro-dimensions of classroom talk but also how social structures are reproduced at macro-levels. Indeed, it has been this orientation toward critique and resistance of injustice that has fueled much of the work in critical discourse studies. In 1994, a group of scholars that became known as the New London Group met in New London, New Hampshire to work out a vision for critical discourse studies. Fairclough, Gee and Kress were among this group and their approaches to discourse analysis have been widely used in literacy research (New London Group, 1996; Rogers, 2011/2004). Some of the early examples of literacy research that used critical discourse analysis include Orellana (1996), Comber (1997), Egan-Robertson (1998) and Young (2000).
