On CDA’s Potential for Application in Education

Abstract

In their introduction to the subsection on critical discourse analysis (CDA) in the article, “Multiple discourse analyses of a workplace interaction”, Marra and Holmes summarize the aims of CDA. These include raising “people’s awareness of the reciprocal influences of language and social structure” (p. 367) as well as showing how “power and dominance are produced and reproduced in social practice through the discourse structure of generally unremarkable interactions” (p. 367). These aims seem to be in line with Fairclough’s (1989) view of the need to “increase consciousness of how language contributes to the domination of some people by others, because consciousness is the first step towards emancipation” (p. 1).