Van Dijk, Teun A. 2023. Social Movement Discourse: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
la revue du GERAS
1Editors – Not all readers of the journal are entirely familiar with critical discourse analysis (CDA). Could you remind them of what CDA is broadly about and how it may be used by ESP specialists? More particularly, how do you think this approach may inform the teaching and learning of languages for specific purposes?
2Teun A. van Dijk – CDA emerged as an approach within the broad, multidisciplinary field of discourse studies at the end of the 1970s. Roger Fowler, Bob Hodge, Gunther Kress and Tony Trew, in their seminal 1979 book entitled Language and Control, introduced what they called “critical linguistics” with studies showing that some syntactic structures of sentences, such as passives and nominalizations, may be used to mitigate or obfuscate the (negative) actions of the police or powerful men, for instance in news headlines on social protest. In the 1980s, this book was followed by many articles and books, e.g., by Ruth Wodak, Norman Fairclough and myself, that offered a broader critical perspective on many other discourse structures beyond the sentence level. This approach was first called “critical discourse analysis” (CDA), but later changed to “critical discourse studies” (CDS) to avoid the false impression, still frequent today in several disciplines, that CDA is a method, and not a general approach, with many theories, methods and applications.
3Studies within this general approach first and primarily focused on the ways discourse may be used to establish, enhance and reproduce social or political power abuse, as is the case for racist, sexist or homophobic discourse within broader contexts of sociopolitical domination and inequality. More recently, it was stressed that CDS should also examine the ways discourse may be used to resist such domination, as is the case for feminist, antiracist or antimilitarist discourse, or to express empathy, e.g., with refugees, or solidarity, as is the case with many social movements.
4CDS is relevant for the teaching and learning of languages, first because it does not limit language study to sentence structures, or even only to words or syntax. CDS also focuses on structures of language and language use at the level of discourse such as specific structures of text and talk, or themes, topics, style, rhetoric, narrative, argumentation, and structures of genres in their communicative contexts. CDS also better connects the study, the teaching and the learning of language to the fields of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology and applied linguistics which focus on the acquisition and the uses of language.
5In my view it is impossible to teach or learn a language without this broader focus on discourse and actual language use. Within this broader perspective, CDS especially studies and raises consciousness of how language and language use are involved in serious social issues and problems, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, poverty, inequality and oppression – also studied in other disciplines and in the classroom.
6Editors – To what extent have you used CDA in the classroom to help students read and analyse texts critically? Do you think this would be a suitable approach to ESP teaching, as it is claimed to promote language proficiency development?
7Teun A. van Dijk – Before teaching CDS, my teaching of more general discourse studies in the university classroom started after my PhD dissertation in 1972 on “text grammar”. It showed that the study of language was not limited to the lexicon or syntax, but was also about meaning and hence includes semantics. And to account for meaning of sequences of sentences and whole texts one needs not only notions such as cohesion, but also coherence, notions ignored in traditional sentence grammars. Such teaching was also relevant to me because my first academic studies were on literature, and especially on poetry, and obviously these forms of language use require a discourse approach. Until today, this also unifies the study of language and literature in the classroom.
8In the mid-1970s, as I was looking for a psychological account of the notion of “macrostructure” I had developed to explain global discourse topics and coherence, I discovered that cognitive psychologists also were beginning to extend their experimental studies of language processes to the structures of discourse, for instance in memory experiments with stories. I thus discovered Walter Kintsch and started to work with him in the USA, first with studies on memories of stories. Then, I used stories of Boccaccio for my first informal memory experiments in the classroom, showing that what students remember is of course not the local detail of stories, but primarily the overall meaning or “topics” of the stories.
9Later, in 1983, Kintsch and I published an influential book, Strategies of Discourse Comprehension (Van Dijk and Kintsch 1983), which showed in detail that understanding discourse does not take place in terms of the levels and structures studied in linguistics and discourse studies, but in terms of flexible cognitive strategies that can operate at various levels. For instance, understanding the headline of a news article or the title of an article, already provides useful hypotheses about the overall meaning (the semantic macrostructure) of a text.
10After my visits and lectures in Latin America, first in Mexico in the 1970s, I realized that the new field of discourse studies also needed a social, critical component so as to account for the many forms of racism, poverty and inequality I had witnessed, as was the case for the situation of indigenous peoples. So, as from 1981 at the University of Amsterdam in my research, I started to focus on the ways in which racism also appears in discourse in the Netherlands, first in my studies of the press and then in a project on everyday talk on “foreigners” in some neighborhood in Amsterdam. My students always participated in these projects, e.g. by analyzing news articles on immigrants, or interviewing people on immigration. In 1985, I spent some time at the University of California at San Diego, and also there the students assisted me to collect data by interviewing local people about immigrants from Mexico. All this research has been published in many books and articles, and has been taught in classrooms. I thus combined teaching, applying and testing theories, discussing and analyzing data, and thus educating students in multidisciplinary studies of discourse in general, and racist discourse and inequality, in particular. This has been the case for 40 years now, first at the university of Amsterdam, then teaching some time in Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s, but since the 1980s, especially in all countries of Latin America, such as Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Chile – and finally, since 1999 in Spain until today.
11All my classroom teaching has always been related to the development of notions, theories and methods of (critical) discourse studies, and their applications in the study of social phenomena and issues, such as news in the press, racism, antiracism, refugees, imperialism, and so on. Therefore, my main aim of teaching is not only that students learn about language, text and talk, but also about social issues, and thus to become knowledgeable critical citizens.
12Editors – As we attended your talk in Winterthur at the GERAS conference last March, we very much enjoyed the moment when you commented upon a text published by an American weapon-making company. Why did you choose this example in particular? To what extent can CDS help ESP specialists observe specialised discourses and cultures?
13Teun A. van Dijk – To explain the use of this revealing example, I first need to say that, after many of my studies on racist and then on antiracist discourse, over the last seven years, I have become interested in the study of social movement discourse. This study was triggered especially by my criticism of a very popular method in the study of social movements: frame analysis. By analyzing 150 articles using such frame analysis, I showed that each article used it to describe many different structures of discourse, so that this was not a very useful method, but only a very vague way of studying text and talk of social movements. So I urged this field of research to finally start to use discourse studies which were already widely known since the 1970s and 1980s. Obviously, I then needed to show this was not just a negative critique, and so I wrote a book (Van Dijk 2023) introducing discourse studies for scholars and students of social movements – mostly in sociology – with applications in the study of the discourses of and about Refugees Welcome Movement, a typical solidarity movement.
14Because my research and teaching on discourse since the 1970s always had a prominent cognitive dimension – besides those of discourse and society – I felt my study of social movements also needed a cognitive dimension, for which, however, there was no place in my last book on social movement discourse. So, my next book will be about social movement cognition, such as knowledge, ideologies, norms and values, mental models, etc. For that book, I decided to study another movement: the Antimilitarist Movement, part of the general Peace Movement. So, as I was just beginning research for this new book, I decided to select for my lecture in Winterthur a page of a major international arms company, Lockheed-Martin, and selected a text from their website – a typical text of corporate positive self-presentation – on sustainability. I was curious to know what a company that produces the most terrible weapons destroying people and environments would say on the popular issue of sustainability. This is another example of how I combine a new theory (on social movement cognition) and critical discourse studies with teaching in a lecture.
15At the same time, as is the case for many students and scholars, I had of course discovered and used Chat-GPT (including some critical tests showing it hardly knows about theories of discourse) and was curious how it would generate a text on sustainability for a big international arms company. Not surprisingly, but still interestingly, the Chat-GPT text was nearly the same as the text of Lockheed-Martin, showing that their attitude and text on the topic is literally standard – as the millions of data for Chat-GPT show.
16Editors – The concept of epistemic communities is likely to be of great interest for ESP specialists. Could you tell us what this concept means to you and how you think it might be embraced by ESP specialists, especially those interested in specialised discourse analysis?
17Teun A. van Dijk – Within a broader, multidisciplinary framework, my work on the cognitive strategies used in the production and comprehension of discourse also needs a social component. Thus, a general theory of knowledge and its structures in the mind and the brain, defined as true beliefs and shared by people in general and language users in particular, also requires a sociological definition, namely as the beliefs shared by the members of an epistemic community. As is the case for many types of discourse in many societies, this also implies that there are many different or overlapping epistemic communities, e.g., those of a discipline, a craft, a specialization, age (e.g., of adolescents), gender, ethnicity, as well as space and place (family, neighbourhood, town, province, state and country). The discourse of these communities presupposes that the shared knowledge is based on epistemic criteria or methods which establish “true” beliefs, as opposed to opinions or prejudice.
18Obviously, as shown by Foucault and others, this notion is also related to that of power, because the knowledge of some community is found to be “real” knowledge, e.g., Western knowledge claiming to be universal – a classical form of supremacy and (neo) colonialism. At the same time, such an approach also needs a critical perspective by highlighting the role of local, opposite, resistant, or alternative knowledges, as is the case for the knowledge of women, feminists, ethnic minorities or antiracists, and so on, e.g., to challenge the presumed, wrong or incomplete knowledges of white, western, male, specialists. Again, we see how social structures are related to discourse and cognition. The theory of epistemic communities is an essential, sociopolitical, part of CDS – also to help define the fundamental cognitive notion of knowledge.
19This theoretical approach is crucial also for ESP, because language use, discourse and the theory of discourse genres, need this complex framework, combining detailed discourse analysis, with cognitive and social analysis. In my 2008 and 2009 work on context I have shown that theories of genre should not be limited to the structures of text and talk, but they should also include a detailed analysis of the communicative situation, through the use of mental context models of language users, which may be applied to everyday conversations, news in the press, debates on TV, Facebook posts, scholarly articles, textbooks and hundreds of other genres.
20Editors – The functional aspects of scientific and professional discourse have traditionally been emphasised in ESP studies, perhaps to the detriment of ideology. Do you think ESP specialists should examine the ideological aspects of specialised discourse more systematically, and how?
21Teun A. van Dijk – Yes, ideological analysis has been neglected or ignored in academic studies of language and language use. As is the case for shared knowledge of epistemic communities, ideologies are forms of social cognition. They are generally acquired through public discourse, first in the family and at school, then in social media and the university. Just as knowledge has a social basis in epistemic communities, ideologies are acquired and used by the members of ideological groups such as (anti) feminists, (anti) racists, (anti) militarists, pacifists, etc. Their polarized cognitive structures are in turn related to the social and sociopolitical distinction between ingroups and outgroups, “Us vs Them”.
22These fundamental ideologies and their structures also organize and control more specific ideological attitudes, also forms of social cognition, about social issues such as those on abortion, immigration, gay marriage, euthanasia, and so on.
23These socially shared attitudes influence the personal opinions of individual members – in combination with their personal experiences – and finally their everyday actions and discourse. Since most public discourse more or less explicitly expresses such ideologies, a complete analysis also requires an ideological analysis, especially of political discourse, which is so relevant today in times of much populist discourse, which rather should be called racist, sexist, homophobic, militarist, etc.
24Editors – You often mention the discourse-cognition-society triangle in the sociocognitive approach to CDA. Could you tell us more about the role of cognition? To what extent do you think cognitive interpretations of discourse could be useful for ESP specialists?
25Teun A. van Dijk – In my replies above I have shown how language teaching and research need to be based on discourse analysis, that many properties of discourse are based on cognitive structures and strategies, as is especially the case for personal mental models of personal experiences (e.g., when telling stories), knowledge, attitudes and ideologies (and their norms and values that control opinions), and that both discourse and cognitive structures are multiply related to social and political structures, such as those of interactions, participants and their identities, roles and relations, social groups and group relations (such as those of domination and resistance) and specific and general epistemic communities. This is the general triangle of my research, teaching and social practice as a teacher, scholar and citizen. It is all related and I have shown how.
26Editors – When scholars use CDA to analyse discourse, what common methodological pitfalls do they encounter?
27Teun A. van Dijk – In general, I don’t like to comment in interviews, especially negatively, on the research of other colleagues, whether in discourse studies or other disciplines. I prefer to comment on general tendencies and the state of the arts. For instance, as I said earlier, I was critical of studies of frames that ignored relevant research in discourse studies.
28But I also have more general opinions on research in our field, especially relevant for PhD students and other young scholars. Many disciplines, and the same is true in linguistics and discourse studies, know different “approaches” or “schools”. If such approaches are based on different types of data or topics, e.g., studies on phonology, syntax, semantics, rhetoric, style, narrative, argumentation or genre, I have no problem at all, because they represent subdomains of the larger domains of linguistics, sociolinguistics or discourse studies. They are specializations. Also OK for me are studies based on specific methods, e.g., using grammatical, narrative or corpus methods of analysis. Already a bit more complicated for me is the limitation to a specific theory, and especially a theory of a single theorist, especially when such an “approach” is more like a “school” or even a “sect” that only uses the theory of one “famous” theorist and ignores other theories or methods studying the same phenomena.
29I have found that in such cases this exclusive focus may lead to ignorance of important new developments in the field. For instance, a linguistic theory of discourse limited to the analysis of the grammar of clauses or sentences may ignore advances in the study of relevant discourse structures or the pragmatics of speech acts or politeness phenomena. Similarly, an empiricist study of language data in terms of grammar excluding social or cognitive aspects of language use typically leads to incomplete or even false theories. The same is true for approaches to conversation that exclude important cognitive aspects of talk or aspects of power relations of participants and groups.
30Another example, especially of my experiences in Latin America in general and Brazil in particular, is a division in “lines” of discourse research, defined by language, such as a French or English. In this case a topic may be studied only with literature on the topic in one language, ignoring even more relevant studies in another language. My view is that scholarship is and should be universal, using the best theories and methods available for the study of a specific topic or problem. True, many scholars, and especially PhD students, have learned to read only one or maybe two languages, but often there are translations that can be used of many languages, especially today with automatic translation services.
31It is also true that the current dominance of English as an academic lingua franca – as was the case with Latin or French before, has critical aspects of (neo) colonialism, leading to secondary or even marginal positions and prestige of research in other languages. This has been the case even for scholars who read and write in a major language such as Spanish in many countries, and the domination of scholarly journals in English. Unfortunately, there is no other practical solution, at the moment, to the fact that all scholars learn the lingua franca and compete with each other in the international market of academic publishing. Many scholars of non-dominant languages, also from the global South have thus become famous international theorists. However, of course, we also need not only books in other languages, as is the case for major languages such as Spanish, French, Chinese or German, but also international journals in these languages, also indexed by international companies. More generally, all scholars and especially critical scholars, should be aware and actively combat all forms of marginalization and exclusion of research and publication based on gender, ethnicity, language or world region – as was (and still is) notoriously the case for research by women and black scholars, on the one hand, and scholars who have no access to English, on the other hand. In other words, the main aims, topics and issues relevant in critical discourse studies should also reflexively apply to the very study of language use and discourse itself.
Van Dijk, Teun A. 2023. Social Movement Discourse: An Introduction. London: Routledge.
Van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of Discourse Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
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Teun A. van Dijk, « Interview with Teun A. van Dijk », ASp, 86 | 2024, 143-150.
Teun A. van Dijk, « Interview with Teun A. van Dijk », ASp [En ligne], 86 | 2024, mis en ligne le 18 novembre 2024, consulté le 07 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asp/9211 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ry4
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