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Discourse and practice: New tools for critical discourse analysis is a timely and helpful guidebook that introduces readers to Theo van Leeuwen's distinctive work on critical discourse analysis (CDA) over the past 15 years. In this book van Leeuwen develops an analytical framework to examine the way discourse works in our life, based on Foucault's concept of discourse, Halliday's concept of register, and Bernstein's concept of recontextualization. For van Leeuwen, no matter how abstract discourses may be, they should be considered as representations of social practices. Discourses are socially specific ways of knowing social practices, and they are plural because there are "many different possible ways that the same social practice can be represented" (p. 6).
The book is composed of nine chapters divided into three parts, with the first part (chapter 1) laying the theoretical foundation, the second (chapters 2-7) attending to the elements of social practices and their recontextualizations in great detail, and the third (chapters 8-9) exploring semiotic modes other than language. In chapter 1, "Discourse as the recontextualization of social practice," van Leeuwen discusses the central idea of this book, its conception of discourse as recontextualized social practice. Then, based on the analysis of a short newspaper article, he introduces and explores elements of social practices (participants, actions, performance modes, eligibility conditions, presentation styles, times, locations and resources) and their recontextualizations (substitutions, deletions, rearrangements, additions, reactions, purposes, legitimations and evaluation). Chapter 2, "Representing social actors," investigates how the participants in social practices can be represented in discourse. Considering the lack of biuniqueness that characterizes language, van Leeuwen draws...