Promoting the Reading Comprehension of High-School Students through Critical Discourse Analysis

AbstractThis paper attempts to introduce a range of discourse analysis strategies as a pedagogical tool to demonstrate its practical relevance in teaching reading comprehension. The study that is going to be reported here, will address a new area in Iranian English Language Teaching (ELT). Specifically speaking, it aims at determining what areas of discourse analysis are relevant to teaching EFL reading at Iranian high-school as well as identifying what language teachers and learners can borrow from the linguistic study of text and discourse and make use of in the language classroom as well as outside it. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is amongst the most popular methodologies for the analysis of language and texts. All of us, as language users and makers, are continuously engaged in reading comprehension in our everyday lives. Relatively few studies in Iran have investigated the role of critical discourse analysis in teaching reading comprehension. The article argues that knowing critical discourse analysis techniques lead learners to have a deeper understanding of reading comprehension. Finally, in this paper, some recommendations are suggested: techniques of Critical Discourse Analysis can be used by teachers, students and others; and due to Critical Discourse Analysis skills, they become conscious of the concealed meaning within various kinds of text.Key words: discourse, critical discourse analysis, language teaching, reading copmrehension1. Introductionwhat is language for? Many people think language exists so that we can " say things" in the sense of communicating information. However, language serves a great many functions in our lives. Giving and getting information is by no means the only one. Language does, of course, allows us to inform each other. But it also allows us to do things and to be things, as well. In fact, saying things in language never goes without also doing things and being things. In language, there are important connections among saying (informing),doing (action), and being (identity). If I say anything to you, you cannot really understand it fully if you do not know what I am trying to do and who I am trying to be by saying it.To understand anything fully you need to know who is saying it and what the person saying it is trying to do (Gee, 2011). Discourse analysis is the study of language-in-use. Better put, it is the study of the language at use in the world, not just to say things, but to do things, people use language to communicate, co-operate, help others, and build things like marriage, reputations, and institutions. They also use it to lie, advantage themselves, harm people, and destroy things like marriage, reputations, and institutions (Gee, 2011). Discours analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social, and psychological context, become meaningful and uinified for their users. It is a rapidly expanding field, providing insight intoth problems and processes of language use and language learning, and is therfore of great importance to language teachers. Traditionally, language teacching has concentrated on pronuciation, grammar, and vocabulary, and while these remain the basis of foreign language knoweledge, discourse analysis can drew attention to the skills needed to put this knowledge into action and to achieve successful results in teaching reading comprehension too (Cook, 1990). How do people acquire skill at comprehending what they read? Chastain (2005) acknowledges that the purpose of reading is not just making a student literate but adds rationale thinking, knowledgeablity and self sufficiency. The reading goal is to read for meaning or to recreate the writer1 meanin. To help learners achieve this objective, numerous strategies such as: inferring meaning, previewing, skimming, scanning and understabding the meaning of words from context, to name but a few, heve been introduced (Wegmann & Knezevic, 2008). …