This paper analysed Ernest Hemingway’s The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber using New Criticism framework on symbolism. We conclude the paper with comments for literacy researchers interested in considering CDA as a tool to promote student and teacher efficacy and to engage in scholarship in the pursuit of equity and educational justice. We examine a summer research program where urban teens employed the tools of CDA to advocate for social justice.
The final section considers CDA as a tool for praxis. We draw upon the example of the construction of guidelines for the preparation of English teachers. Section three looks at CDA as a policy tool. The next section examines CDA as a pedagogical tool, looking at its uses in a teacher education program interested in preparing teachers for diverse urban contexts.
We consider two examples that range from the analysis of the development of critical language awareness among urban youth to the investigation of standards documents and the archive of texts that construct a discipline such as English education. We then discuss new possibilities for CDA in literacy research. This article considers new directions for CDA in literacy research as well as additional purposes for the methodological and analytic tool in literacy pedagogy, literacy policy, and literacy praxis. We associate this language study and language praxis with the term critical discourse analysis (CDA). Engagements with institutionalized discourses or the creation of alternative ones.