tailieunhanh - UK and us news coverage of climate change from a critical discourse analysis perspective

In order to investigate the UK and US news coverage of the representations of different nations regarding climate change, this study employed Norman Fairclough’s approach to critical discourse analysis and corpus tools to analyze news reports on international conferences on climate change. | JOURNAL OF SCIENCE OF HNUE Interdisciplinary Science 2014 Vol. 59 No. 5 pp. 105-113 This paper is available online at http UK AND US NEWS COVERAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE FROM A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS PERSPECTIVE Luu Thi Kim Nhung Faculty of English Hanoi National University of Education Abstract. In order to investigate the UK and US news coverage of the representations of different nations regarding climate change this study employed Norman Fairclough s approach to critical discourse analysis and corpus tools to analyze news reports on international conferences on climate change. The results of the analysis depict a world which is polarized by inequalities and it appears that the nations of the world have been unable to reach a consensus on a common treaty om climate change. The collocation patterns and syntactic structures represented developing countries as areas which are both heavily affected by the adverse impacts of climate change and very active in negotiations surrounding this issue. Developed countries were represented in a passive stance and have been avoiding financial responsibility for climate change. The language used in the sample articles indicate that these two newspapers have differing ideologies. The paper concludes with the methodological and practical contributions of the study to present critical discourse analysis and language teaching learning. Keywords Critical discourse analysis corpus linguistics climate change representation. 1. Introduction Ever since NASA s top climatologist James E. Hansen presented his warning of global warming before the US Congress in 1988 the issue has gained its momentum in every field of science and entered into social discourse all over the world. Recently the climate change debate has been evolving more rapidly into a sophisticated global arena in which the voices of scientists politicians media personnel activists and members of the general public are being heard. Among them linguists have