Turning Quantitative: An Analytic Scale to Do Critical Discourse Analysis

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) could be seen as a theory in qualitative more than in qualitative studies. This might have led to difficulty in doing CDA. Accordingly, this study attempted to develop a quantitative profile in the form of an analytic rubric. For this purpose, Fairclough’s model of CDA was selected as the research framework. The techniques used for structuring analytic scales were used over three steps. First, the criteria corresponding to text, context, and text-context interaction were identified as ideology, intertextuality, date, power, contextual clues, background knowledge, and culture. The next step involved validating the extracted criteria through Item-Objective Congruence Index. The final step included scaling via specifying an even number of qualities for each item accompanied by a range of scores. Then, the rubric was checked for reliability. The results of the correlation analysis revealed that the scale is reliable across different raters. The results of the present study might have educational implication for CDA-oriented reading attempts. Moreover, it could open a turning point, since previous efforts to do CDA have been extremely qualitative.