Media representations of China’s inclusive education: A corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

by Yating Yu, Gaoqiang Lu, Kuen Fung Sin, Zhiying Yu

The Chinese government aspires for inclusive education to serve as an exemplary model in addressing educational inequity issues and establishing a responsible global image as a major power. Nevertheless, there has been limited focus on China’s news media coverage concerning its inclusive education initiatives aimed at international audiences. To bridge this gap, this study employed a corpus-assisted critical discourse analytic approach to examine China’s self-image in relation to its inclusive education endeavours. Seventy-three English-language news articles from the official channel were retrieved for meticulous line-by-line concordance analysis. The results indicate that out of the 520 co-occurring instances, they can be broadly categorised into four groups: efforts to develop inclusive education (65.4%); consensus on benefits of inclusive education (24.5%); challenges faced by inclusive education (4.8%); and others (5.4%). This study illuminates the effective utilisation of official media in the image construction of inclusive education in China.