Critical Discourse Analysis as a Research Tool Hilary Janks University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) stems from a critical theory of language which sees the use of language as a form of social practice. All social practice are tied to specific historical contexts and are the means by which existing social relations are reproduced or contested and different interests are served. It is the questions pertaining to interests - How is the text positioned or positioning? Whose interests are served by this positioning? Whose interests are negated? What are the consequences of this positioning? - that relate discourse to relations of power. Where analysis seeks to understand how discourse is implicated in relations of power, it is called critical discourse analysis. Fairclough's (1989, 1995) model for CDA consists three inter-related processes of analysis tied to three inter-related dimensions of discourse. These three dimensions are 1 The object of analysis (including verbal, visual or verbal and visual texts). 2 The processes by means of which the object is produced and received (writing/ speaking/designing and reading/listening/viewing) by human subjects. 3 The socio-historical conditions which govern these processes. According to Fairclough each of these dimensions requires a different kind of analysis 1 text analysis (description), 2 processing analysis (interpretation), 3 social analysis (explanation). What is useful about this approach is that it enables you to focus on the signifiers that make up the text, the specific linguistic selections, their juxtapositioning, their sequencing, their layout and so on. However, it also requires you to recognise that the historical determination of these selections and to understand that these choices are tied to the conditions of possibility of that utterance. This is another way of saying that texts are instanciations of socially regulated discourses and that the processes of production and reception are socially constrained. Why Fairclough’s approach to CDA is so useful is because it provides multiple points of analytic entry. It does not matter which kind of analysis one begins with, as long as in the end they are all included and are shown to be mutually explanatory. It is in the interconnections that the analyst finds the interesting patterns and disjunctions that need to be described, interpreted and explained. In this paper I will demonstrate how to use this three-part analytic model for working with a text. However, one of the weaknesses of verbal accounts is that words cannot be presented as a gestalt: words march in rows one after the other, structured into a meaningful order. Analysis is not always as tidily linear. Fairclough tries to capture the simultaneity of his method of CDA with a model that embeds the three different kinds of analysis one inside the other. See Figure 1 (Fairclough, 1995: 98). Include Fairclough model here: Figure 1 The embedding of the boxes emphasises the interdependence of these dimensions and the intricate moving backwards and forwards between the different types of analysis which this