A Critical Discourse Analysis of Selected Iranian and Saudi Arabian Print Media on Civil War in Syria

Abstract This study tried to examine the relationship between language strategies/sources and ideologies, and how ideologies are constructed and expressed through language strategies in different English newspapers with different political contexts. The focus of the study was on the style of representation of Syrian civil war in Tehran-Times and Asharq Al-Awsat newspapers. The data from these newspapers were culled from 2012 to 2013. The analyzed texts, which was conducted on the basis of Van Dijk’s (2000) Us-Them and M.A.K. Halliday’s (1985) Transitivity Theory, revealed that the newspapers passivized, downgraded, legitimatized, delegitimized, euphemized, and demonized the involved parties in the war in order to show their desired parties’ standpoint as positive, their positive actions overstated and their negative actions understated. The findings of the study provides implications for syllabus designers, material developers, and language teachers to equip language learners with decent communication and increase their awareness regarding the use of different language sources in a variety of communication contexts.