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teaching of Japanese history from a view of 1995 textbooks and their interpretation of the
Rape of Nanking in 1937 and 1938, it has similarities with the research undertaken for this
dissertation in terms of using CDA to analyse the representation of a nation’s history through
textbooks. Like Barnard’s study, the analysis of texts for this project investigates the
language of textbooks in creating certain historic ‘truths’ about specific events in a nation’s
history (Japan in Barnard’s case and Australia in the case here), and in doing so maintaining a
reporting of events that aims to sustain the dominant socio-political views, or in the views of
the curriculum writers, the status quo (Barnard, 2001). Identifying strategies for maintaining
a status quo was also the focus of analysis of an earlier UK-based study conducted by Whitty
who found that
…pupils were taught a particular view of the world in school and that, because there
was no examination of the presuppositions upon which that view was based or of the
social processes through which such a view developed, pupils were like to accept as
an immutable ‘fact’ what was but one ideological version of the world…by
concentrating on the activities of Crowns, Lords and Commons, they served to
‘naturalize’ the existing British constitution…what was taught in schools acted as a
means of social control and served to sustain the status quo. (1985, pp. 19-20)
For this project then, the application of CDA has the capacity to begin to challenge the status
quo presented in school textbooks. As Wodak points out “for CDA, language is not powerful
on its own – it gains power by the use powerful people make of it” (2001b, p. 10, emphasis
added). Similarly, but regarding the naturalizing of discourses rather than directly discussing
a status quo, Rogers writes, “the goal of CDA is to denaturalize ideologies that have been
naturalized…work across disciplines has demonstrated that linguistic interactions (process)
and linguistic realizations (meaning) are structured in ways that reproduce dominant
ideologies (2004, p. 252, emphasis added).
The relevance of CDA as a tool of analysis is explained by Barnard as residing in “…the
range of meaning-making potential possessed by a language and, by seeking to identify the
specific choices made in any particular communicative situation, question why such choices
have been made…” (2001, p. 519). In relating this to textbook analysis, the following
statement on the study of US textbooks provides an overview which highlights a similar
direction that the analysis of documents this research takes.
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