| Critical Discourse Analysis |
| Introduction
Critical Discourse Analysis |
Students are asked, then, to draw on their experiences with religion, and to consider their experiences in relationship to lyrics of mainstream music and to what other students have to say. My aim, as I have said, is to provide a space in which students' experiences and knowledges are valued. At the same time, I hope that the recontextualization of mainstream music and religion will generate new ways of thinking about music and religion. In their writing, students perform a careful analysis of the lyricists' expressions of faith. Students read the lyrics and listen to the music, then, using their experiences and histories as a point of beginning, they analyze these texts and describe in writing their interpretation of them. The question they must ultimately answer is "Do the lyricists believe in God?" In answering that question, they must rely on evidence they find in the songs' lyrics. In their essays, then, students employ some of the traditional practices of academic writing: the close analysis and interpretation of text. They are working in a context that is familiar to them, religion and music, but they are looking closely at how the lexical and non-lexical features of the text create meaning. In addition, they are able to see, through reading their peers' essays, that the same textual features mean different things to different people. Students are exposed to a variety of viewpoints, an experience that helps create new knowledge for all of us. In order to get students thinking about language closely, I adapted methods of critical discourse analysis from Norman Fairclough. The project of CDA, developed in linguistics and drawn from M.A.K. Halliday's system of functional linguistics, is much broader than what I use. As Fairclough describes in Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research, CDA encompasses the analysis of many linguistic categories such as the relationship between the structure of the text and the agent of the text (22); the orders of discourse (24); a method for analyzing discourse that involves genres, or "ways of acting," discourses, or "ways of representing," and styles, "or ways of being" (26). While I rely on Fairclough for a broad theoretical description of CDA, I rely on Teun van Dijk's more focussed description of what the performance of critical discourse analysis entails: “CDA studies features of discourse that can vary as a function of social power. Thus, stress and intonation, word order, lexical style, coherence [. . .] topic choice, speech acts, schematic organization, rhetorical figures and most forms of interaction” are among many possible areas of investigation in CDA” (96). Within the framework that I provide in the assignment, students perform a close analysis of the lyrics. As Ron Christiansen notes in the discourse analysis he provides of his own comments on student papers, while "not common in many composition and education studies, close analysis is clearly a distinctive feature of research in CDA." In what follows, I present the assignment and then describe the elements of CDA that the assignment is based on. My purpose in this part of the sequence of assignments is to emphasize for students the various ways that texts produce meaning, and also, implicitly, to suggest that readers often disagree in their interpretation of texts. The Assignment In the assignment, I ask students to reflect on and write in response to the following questions after they've listened to the music, read the lyrics, and watched the videos (the separate elements are numbered here for convenience):
Keep this activity in mind when you begin your research on academic discourse communities. Are discourse communities really something that can be said to exist? How do we identify them? What is the value of identifying them? Theoretical Grounding The first two questions are grounded in CDA's concept of intertextuality; question three draws out presuppositions; questions four and five ask students to identify and interpret the tone; and question six asks for a conclusion based on their interpretation. While basic writing students, or any students in the first year writing sequence, are unlikely to directly examine this theoretical background, I present the rationale for the assignment here because CDA provides some useful terms for describing some of the kinds of analysis that are valued in composition. In addition, I want to demonstrate how the assignment relies on students' knowledge and also pushes them toward textual analysis. According to Fairclough, intertextuality is significant because, to dramatically reduce the argument, intertextuality at its most open is dialogical. Fairclough takes “a very broad view of intertextuality. In its most obvious sense, intertextuality is the presence of actual elements of other texts within a text—quotations” (39). Fairclough distinguishes between intertextuality and assumption, claiming that an “important contrast between intertextuality and assumption is that the former broadly opens up difference by bringing other ‘voices’ into a text, whereas the latter broadly reduces difference by assuming common ground” (41). In my use of intertextuality, I want to focus students’ attention on the way the inclusion of text shapes meaning; specifically, are other voices included, or are they simply referred to? By moving from intertextuality in questions one and two to assumption or presupposition in question three, I intend to move students from an examination of the dialogicality in the text to an examination of the writer's assumption. As with intertextuality, the concept of presupposition provides students with another tool for examining at the sentence level how texts create meaning. Questions four and five, based on van Dijk's work in CDA, are much more abstract, and are intended to get students thinking about how meaning is created lexically. In their responses to these questions, students did not think through the implication of intertextuality or presupposition. This suggests that in future versions of this assignment I should perhaps focus more specifically on what intertextuality and presupposition imply about meaning. The part of the assignment that addresses tone, a much more familiar concept, produces rich and detailed responses. Students use this very abstract concept of tone in language to interpret the lyrics in terms of the writer's belief in God or gods, and they rely on the text to support their interpretations. Students' Responses In response to these final three questions, students look very closely at how meaning is created through text. In the best essays, students perform textual analyses in which they make claims about the lyricist's beliefs and then support those claims with textual evidence. Several students, for example, comment that the repetition of "hallelujah" in the background of Big Boi's song adds significant force to the idea that the song expresses a belief in God. One student writes that
Here the student is beginning to make connections between very different songs, and performing a reading practice in which she locates patterns and interprets their meaning. The pattern she identifies is the tone of doubt produced by specific words: Bright Eyes' demand for understanding and Grae's questioning. In making these connections, the writer perhaps alters her definitions of pop and rap music while engaging in close textual analysis. Another student, writing about the song "Don't Know When but a Day Is Gonna Come," writes that Bright Eyes wonders
In this example, the student performs an analysis of the language the writer uses to describe and address God. She presents an example of him questioning the value of faith, then an example of him demanding an explanation if an explanation exits. From this data, she accurately concludes that the writer has no idea what to believe. In performing this kind of analysis, the student rehearses a mode of writing that she will perform repeatedly during her college education. |