ABSTRACT
This chapter looks critically at Critical Discourse Analysis/Studies (CDA/S), evaluating its strengths, assumptions, and weaknesses, before moving on to look at related educational textual concerns, such as critical literacy. While the focus is on how broader social and political forces relate to the production and reception of texts, a central focus is on issues of discourse and ideology: How is it that texts come to mean as they do and how does this relate to questions of power? Central concerns here are whether we see power as something that some people have while others do not, or whether we see it as a more diffused set of operations; whether we see ideology as a distortion of the truth that is realized in discourse (so CDA/S attempts to unmask the truth behind the curtain of ideological distortion), or whether we see discourses as ways of viewing the world (so CDA/S seeks to understand how the world is discursively constructed). The second part of the chapter looks at critical literacies – as a form of applied CDA/S – and focuses in particular on a debate between access-oriented and inclusivity-oriented approaches to literacy. The issue here is whether the focus of critical literacy is primarily on providing the tools for engagement (powerful language) or enabling students to voice their concerns (powerful voices). The conclusion looks at ways these debates can be resolved by bringing together a focus on discursive construction and material inequality.
