Tuesday, June 06, 2006
A partial answer
I suppose that everything has to do with how we set things out from the beginning. In searching for an answer for my own questions I went back to Teun A. Van Dijk’s (2003) article titled "Critical Discourse Analysis". The way Van Dijk defines CDA is very different from that of Rebecca Rogers, et al. (2005). Lets see …
Van Dijk starts his article by stating “Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (p. 352). On the other hand, Rogers et al. presented CDA as focusing “on how language as a cultural tool mediates relationships of power and privilege in social interactions, institutions, and bodies of knowledge” (p. 367). Both definitions include the concept of power, but Rogers also included the idea of “language as a cultural tool” absent in Van Dijk’s definition. Still this is not to say that Van Dijk does not consider language and culture in critical discourse analysis.
For Van Dijk, CDA tries to explain discourse structures “in terms of properties of social interaction and …social structures” (p. 353). Again the idea of explaining why things are the way they are comes up – one that I have not seen in Gee’s writings yet [probably a misinterpretation??!!]. Note that the idea of finding an explaination is the third step presented in Foucault’s framework. These are three intersecting domains: to describe (textual explanation), to interpret (discursive presentation), and to offer an explanation (society-wide interpretation).
So I wonder if it would be appropriate to say that Gee’s Discourse Analysis is more oriented toward the identification of cultural models; that it is more descriptive, that it seems to be in search of questions, a hypothesis, or even theory building, to be answered or examined with further research. In this sense, Gee’s Discourse Analysis is more theoretical, grounded in data that is recursively analyzed, whose final object is to develop ‘Discourse models’ – cultural representations. With this, note that no explanation is presented, just a theory or hypothesis [if you which], a description and interpretation of data recursively analyzed with different questions (building tasks questions) and inquiry tools.
However, is language and therefor discourse always related to power? According to Rogers, et al., “language is a social practice and because not all social practices are created and treated equally, all analyses of language are inherently critical” (p. 367).
The search continues … I feel like I’m searching for a treasure, like a mine digger, a treasure hunter … And while I wait for a book to arrive, I’ll continue reading more about critical approaches to research.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2003). Critical Discourse Analysis. In Schiffrin, D. S., Tahnen, D., and Hamilton, H. E. (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 352-371.
Van Dijk starts his article by stating “Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context” (p. 352). On the other hand, Rogers et al. presented CDA as focusing “on how language as a cultural tool mediates relationships of power and privilege in social interactions, institutions, and bodies of knowledge” (p. 367). Both definitions include the concept of power, but Rogers also included the idea of “language as a cultural tool” absent in Van Dijk’s definition. Still this is not to say that Van Dijk does not consider language and culture in critical discourse analysis.
For Van Dijk, CDA tries to explain discourse structures “in terms of properties of social interaction and …social structures” (p. 353). Again the idea of explaining why things are the way they are comes up – one that I have not seen in Gee’s writings yet [probably a misinterpretation??!!]. Note that the idea of finding an explaination is the third step presented in Foucault’s framework. These are three intersecting domains: to describe (textual explanation), to interpret (discursive presentation), and to offer an explanation (society-wide interpretation).
So I wonder if it would be appropriate to say that Gee’s Discourse Analysis is more oriented toward the identification of cultural models; that it is more descriptive, that it seems to be in search of questions, a hypothesis, or even theory building, to be answered or examined with further research. In this sense, Gee’s Discourse Analysis is more theoretical, grounded in data that is recursively analyzed, whose final object is to develop ‘Discourse models’ – cultural representations. With this, note that no explanation is presented, just a theory or hypothesis [if you which], a description and interpretation of data recursively analyzed with different questions (building tasks questions) and inquiry tools.
However, is language and therefor discourse always related to power? According to Rogers, et al., “language is a social practice and because not all social practices are created and treated equally, all analyses of language are inherently critical” (p. 367).
The search continues … I feel like I’m searching for a treasure, like a mine digger, a treasure hunter … And while I wait for a book to arrive, I’ll continue reading more about critical approaches to research.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2003). Critical Discourse Analysis. In Schiffrin, D. S., Tahnen, D., and Hamilton, H. E. (Eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis, pp. 352-371.
