Critical Discourse Analysis

• In Event: Beyond Thematic Coding: Applications of Qualitative Methods to Advance Motivation Studies

Abstract

As an applied linguist, I study how learners’ investment [1] in present and future multilingual identities is constrained and/or encouraged by outside forces. I identify relevant texts, such as Twitter data from #SpeakAmerican, a hashtag that spiked in reaction to the multilingual Coca-Cola advertisement, “It’s Beautiful.” Since the purpose of critical discourse analysis (CDA) is to study “opaque as well as transparent structural relationships of dominance, discrimination, power, and control as manifested in language,” (Wodak & Meyer, 2001/2009, p. 10), CDA is suitable for this research question and data set.
At the micro-level, CDA involves analyzing words, grammatical features, metaphors, sentence linkages, interactional conventions, and structures of a text. At the meso-level, the text’s production and consumption are investigated. At the macro-level, the text’s relationship to social conditions, societal structures, and other texts is examined (Fairclough 1989/2001). At each level, the objective is to identify how a text communicates (a) experiential values - the text producer’s knowledge and beliefs about reality; (b) relational values - how the text reflects and creates social relationships; and (c) expressive values - how the text producer evaluates a particular topic (Fairclough, 1989/2001).
As I immerse myself in the data, I develop micro-, meso-, and macro-level codes and analyze their significance. At the meso-level, I examine the production of the advertisement’s “America the Beautiful” soundtrack sung in English, Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Hindi, Hebrew, Keres, Senegalese-French, and Arabic (Coca-Cola, Feb. 14, 2014), identifying its debut during Super Bowl XLVIII as an act of public multilingualism. At the macro-level, I contextualize the advertisement as existing in a society supportive of the assimilationist argument that “English is the mark of Americanness [and] good citizenship” and multilingualism represents “a rejection of the American way of life, [and] an act of subversion” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 20).
At the micro-level, I analyze how individuals use language to position their linguistic identities in response to the advertisement. On February 3, 2014, @TracyDeLopez tweeted:
Este tweet es en espanol solo por molestar a la gente que
dicen “#SpeakAmerican.” Hablar dos idiomas es una
cosa bella.
[This tweet is in Spanish just to annoy people who say “#SpeakAmerican.” Speaking two languages is a beautiful thing.]
Using the phrase “just to annoy,” @TracyDeLopez communicates that she can use English but chooses not to. Just as the advertisement asserts the reality of a multilingual nation, she expresses her present identity as a speaker of two languages, presumably Spanish and English, suggesting that her investment in the maintenance and/or development of these languages will continue in spite of and in resistance to the assimilationist sentiments suggested by the hashtag #SpeakAmerican, which she has utilized for her own purposes.
As demonstrated above, CDA is useful for analyzing discourse involving the production, reproduction, and contestation of language ideologies. It offers a methodological framework for examining individuals’ investment in their linguistic identities.

[1] In Applied Linguistics, motivation is reconceptualized as investment (Darvin and Norton, 2015), focusing on how language learners invest in present and imagined identities (Wenger, 1998).

Author

• Brooke Y. Hoffman, Temple University