ABSTRACT
To analyse the interview data from Chinese students, teachers and parents collected as part of the Q methodology, this study of their attitudes towards English combines Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with grounded theory and the keywords approach, as the first step into CDA. Grounded theory and the keywords approach were devised as a coding strategy for the interviews, which were then examined and interpreted within the CDA framework to link the findings to the wider sociocultural and political contexts. This chapter outlines the process of grounded theory and the keywords approach, and discusses the theoretical groundings underpinning CDA, including the work of Foucault, Bakhtin and Kristeva. It also introduces Wodak’s discourse-historical approach as a strand of CDA used particularly for the analysis of the interviews, along with the fundamental assumptions, principles and procedures of CDA adopted from scholars such as Fairclough and van Dijk.
