A Critical Discourse Analysis of English Electronic News Reports on Environmental Sustainability

This research aims to discover the discourse features of English electronic news reports (EENRs) on environmental sustainability which are lexical, grammatical and textual features in light of critical discourse analysis (CDA) by Fairclough [3]. A combination of mixed research methods was applied with the qualitative method including a descriptive analysis and the support of the quantitative approach. 69 EENRs on the topic concerned were collected from the UN News website. The study results reveal that words and expressions related to the topic of environmental sustainability, formal words, content words and metaphors are typical lexical features of the discourse. The transitivity, passive and active voices, modes of sentences, relational modality, pronouns, expressive modality and cohesion are also recorded as grammatical features of the discourse