A Critical Study of CDA-based Researchers in Iran’s Scholarly Journals

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in employing Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of literary and non-literary issues in scholarly journals in Iran. The fairly high number of such articles constitutes a reasonable corpus to be used for Meta-analysis method to evaluate the application of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis by Iranian scholars in their analysis of literary and non-literary fields. With this in view, the search for the relevant papers using key terms such as CDA and Norman Fairclough began and eventually 87 scholarly articles published from 2000 to 2023 were identified. Drawing on the categories and instruments of meta-analysis, the researcher grouped the findings into the descriptive and qualitative sections whose data were summarized and displayed in 6 tables and 6 diagrams. The descriptive findings showed that literary scholars ranked as the highest users of Fairclough’s approach and the social sciences scholars as the lowest users. The qualitative findings made it clear that scholars dived directly into Fairclough’s framework, without probing into his practice and model in analyzing social phenomena. Moreover, the majority of the researches reduced Fairclough’s framework to textual-thematic level and ignored the social aspect of the object of the research. Most of the literary scholars who have used Fairclough’s framework have disregarded his admonition that literature poses a challenge to Critical Discourse Analysis. At the end, some suggestions have been made about Norman Fairclough’s approach and its strengths and weaknesses.   
 
 
Extended Abstract
1. Introduction
For its tremendous capabilities in textual, cultural, political, and social analysis, CDA has attracted numerous researchers in humanities in Iran. In other words, researchers tend to orient toward and employ CDA for their studies. The fairly high number of such articles constitutes a reasonable corpus to be used for Meta-analysis method to evaluate the application of Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis by Iranian scholars. This study hypothesised that Fairclough-based researches in Iran tend to reduce his three-dimension model.
 2. Methodology
To evaluate the above-mentioned hypothesis, the search for the relevant papers using key terms such as “CDA,” “Norman Fairclough,” “Fairclough’s Model,” and “Fairclough Method,” began and eventually 87 scholarly articles published from 2000 to 2023 were identified in Noor Specialized journals Website, Magiran, and Comprehensive Humanities Portal (Ensani), as well as Google for publications in English. The selected papers were thoroughly studied; 60 articles were chosen as the statistical sample of the research: 39 in literature, 3 in film studies, 1 in art, 10 in historio-religious studies, 3 in journalism, 2 in institutions, and 2 in social studies. Drawing on the categories and instruments of meta-analysis, the researcher grouped the findings into the descriptive and qualitative sections whose data were summarised and displayed in 6 tables and 6 diagrams.
 3. Theoretical Framework
Meta-analysis is a statistical technique that combines the results of multiple individual studies to develop a more robust and comprehensive conclusion about a research question. It essentially synthesizes the data from various studies to provide a broader perspective and increase statistical power. It includes formulating a research question, conducting a systematic review, extracting data, performing statistical analysis, interpreting results, and reporting the findings. The present study is a qualitative one, and so are the chosen articles. That said, the meta-analytic approach is in accordance with its relevance to a qualitative study.
 4. Discussion and Analysis
 The meta-analysis of the above-mentioned papers produced qualitative and analytical data. The results of this study were categorised in three subheadings: descriptive meta-analytical findings, qualitative analysis, and data interpretation. In the descriptive findings section, a statistical report of the reviewed studies was presented in subsections, such as the application of the Fairclough method in various fields, the geographical distribution of researchers, the frequency distribution of researchers’ gender, the typology of researchers, and the time period and number of published articles. In the analysis of the theoretical findings, the implementation of Fairclough's method and qualitative evaluation of research (i.e. what, why, and how of the research) were examined. A review of the sample research articles showed that all of conducted studies used “how questions,” and it seems that researchers considered themselves to be free from the need to delve into the what and why of Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis and instead focused on its application.
 5. Conclusion
While Fairclough considers literature as a challenge for CDA, his approach has been most widely used in the field of literary research. In articles in which examining the non-discursive aspect of the subject under study is a must, a key notion is missing: some studies have only explored one of Fairclough’s three levels. Qualitatively, and informed by Belinsky’s three indicators, most of the existing researches belong to how type, not what and why type. In other words, researchers have simply sought to employ Fairclough’s approach and have taken familiarity and mastery of Fairclough’s theories for granted.
 
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