Abstract Summary
From 2010-Present, The National, an Emirati English-language newspaper, has published dozens of Education articles, Opinion and Comment pieces, and Letters-to-the-Editor on the ‘debate’ of Arabic versus English as a medium of instruction in its government-sponsored schools and universities. This media debate centers around the use of and attitudes towards Arabic and English not only in education, but in their roles in national identity, religion, modernization, and globalization. The aim of this paper is to present results of a critical discourse analysis that analyzes the language of the media debate in order to discover how the 'interests' of the Emiratis and foreign nationals living, working and studying in the UAE are “represented, helped, or harmed” (Gee 2014) as a result of language policies in education.
Abstract :
The National is an Emirati, government-owned newspaper purportedly modeled on Western journalism standards; however, the UAE is ranked poorly at 133 in the 2019 World Press Freedom Index (Reporters Without Borders, 2019). From 2010-Present, The National has published dozens of Education articles, Opinion and Comment pieces, and Letters-to-the-Editor on the ‘debate’ of Arabic versus English as a medium of instruction in its government-sponsored schools and universities. This media debate centers around the use of and attitudes towards Arabic and English not only in education, but in their roles in national identity, religion, modernization, and globalization.
Keeping Findlow’s (2006) analysis of linguistic dualism in higher education in mind, the aim of this paper is to present results of a critical discourse analysis that analyzes the language of the media debate in order to discover how the ‘”interests’” of the Emiratis and foreign nationals living, working and studying in the UAE are “represented, helped, or harmed” (Gee 2014) as a result of language policies in education. These “interests” revolve around how national identities and language policies are represented by the published articles, comments and editorials, which have, presumably, been censored and permitted to be printed while English, the language of globalization and lingua-franca of the UAE, continues to open the UAE and erase its mother tongue.
In order to conduct the critical discourse analysis of the media debate, a corpus of more than five dozen published pieces was created using AntConc freeware concordance software by converting html files to .txt files. Keywords related to national identity, English, Arabic, religion, modernization and globalization were analyzed in context and according to tags of type of article published, date and author.
