Teun A. van Dijk, Teach Yourself CDS !


Un-learn misconceptions!

Before engaging in CDS, it is useful to un-learn frequent misconceptions about CDA/CDS. The first of these misconceptions is that CDS is a method of analysis or research. Rather, CDS is:

An academic movement of a group of socially and politically committed scholars, or, more individually, a socially critical attitude of doing discourse studies.

Especially also for students and scholars from the social sciences, it should be recalled that the same is true for discourse analysis in general:

discourse analysis is NOT a method of research, but rather a (cross-) discipline.

Hence our preference for the terms Discourse Studies, in general, and for Critical Discourse Studies, in particular.

That is, unlike for instance a method such as 'content analysis' (see Wikipedia for a definition), discourse analysis is no more than the general academic activity of studying discourse. And such a study can be carried by a large number of different methods. Mostly, these methods will be 'qualitative', rather than 'quantitave', but such is not always the case. Methods may range from detailed, formal analysis of syntax or conversational turn-taking, to studies of narrative or argumentative structures, rhetorical strategies, on the one hand, to experimental methods in the cognitive psychology of text production and comprehension, as well as ethnographic methods in the study of social and cultural aspects of language use and interaction. In sum, by studying social problems, one does not engage in CDS as a method, but need to learn and apply one of the many methods used in discourse analysis, linguistics, psychology or the social sciences.

In sum: CDS may have preferred fields of exploration and study (such as specific social problems, to which I shall return in another module) , but it does not have its own methods !!!