PERTANIKA JOURNAL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

The present contribution is an attempt to make a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) comparison between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign discourses, based on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework. The educational aim of the present study is to introduce an applicable approach through a new analytical framework for reading journalistic texts among EFL learners in order to equip them with the critical ability and analytical skills to achieve a depth-understanding of the texts. So this is a corpus-based qualitative-quantitative study focusing on how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use. Through close analysis of texts we can find out where and why implicit messages and explicit meanings are foregrounded or backgrounded. The findings of the current study can be utilized for English foreign language learners to promote their critical ability to analyze the journalistic texts and this, in turn, can enhance the EFL learners’ motivation in reading comprehension.