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form of words and many structures of sentences are grammatically obligatory and
contextually invariant and hence usually not subject to speaker control, and hence irrelevant
for a study of social power” (2001a, p. 99). Threadgold reports that CDA has started to
develop “…towards CDA as itself theory, but it is claimed now to provide a methodology
which is replicable, systematic and verifiable” (2003, p. 10).
CDA is aligned with document analysis in an historical framework due to its focus on the
broader social and political locations and contexts, across historical eras, identifying the
power discourses in language used in primary source documents. The practical application, in
this project, is the study of school History textbooks. As CDA views documents as social
practice, this methodology seeks to explore and explain through content how these texts
communicate to school students. Framing this within an historical approach can therefore use
CDA as “a toolkit” (Widdowson, 1998, p. 137), rather than an entirely prescriptive model. In
aligning CDA within a variety of frameworks, van Dijk refers to its connection with social
sciences and scientists as, “…discourse analysis stresses that social and political institutions,
organizations, group relations, structures, processes, routines…need to be studied at the level
of their actual manifestations, expressions or enactment in discourse as language use…and
interaction” (1997, p. 32). In the case of this project, those manifestations of discourse are
evidenced through textbook content and its relationship or interactions with their historical
context, thus reinforcing the validity of using CDA across a range of disciplines, including, in
this case, historical methodology. Contextualising textbooks to the specific era they were
published in forms an important aspect of the research for this project. Consequently,
textbooks are viewed as a controlled medium, as they are published with a very specific
audience in mind (school students and teachers) and all content has been included for very
specific reasons, usually aligned with a government sanctioned syllabus, as detailed in the
data analysis chapters. To this end, the following statement made by Verschueren is linked
with the analysis, that is “…it is impossible to interpret any piece of communication without
taking full account of the action or activity type it belongs to with all the contextual
ramifications this involves” (2001, p. 61).
To introduce some common contentions with CDA that are expanded in greater detail later in
this chapter, a variety of criticisms related to CDA and specifically the analysis components
have commonly been lodged at CDA. In particular this includes noting aspects of integrity in
analysis, framing methodological approaches in theory and predicting outcomes of research.
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