The Relationship between Language and Representations of Vocational Students in Thai Newspapers

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the representations of vocational students linguistically constructed in Thai daily newspaper, and analyzing the discourse practice and socio-cultural practice related to the construction of these representations. The data were gathered from three Thai daily newspapers: Thairath, Daily News, and Matichon starting from January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2018. In total, 1,118 texts were gathered and analyzed. In this study, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was adopted as an analytical framework.

The analysis reveals that different linguistic strategies are employed for constructing the representations of vocational students, including using lexical selection, metaphor, modality, intertextuality, presupposition, presupposition denial and contrastive sentence structure. These linguistic strategies are adopted to represent construct both negative and positive representation of vocational students. Remarkably, it is found that the negative representations are mostly presented in the front page news which is outstanding and easy to access. Some negatively represent stereotypes of vocational students while some over-intensify negative attributes. On the contrary, the positive representations are mostly found in educational news and articles which are less accessible. Moreover, sometimes, it is found that some positive representations may unintentionally convey negative attitude against the vocational students. These representations may unfavorably affect people’s attitude about vocational education and may obstruct the governmental attempts to promote vocational education.