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 up a sociosemantic approach that is different from many other linguistically oriented forms of CDA. The network thus established combines what linguists tend to separate: “different lexiogrammatical and discourse-level linguistic systems, transitivity, reference, the nominal group, rhetorical figures and so on” (53).

Chapter 3, “Representing social action,” continues the analysis of the same sample text as in chapter 2, shifting the focus to social actors. Van Leeuwen presents a descriptive framework, employing critical categories such as objectivation and naturalization, and relating them to the specific grammatical and rhetorical realizations. Chapter 4, “Time in discourse,” examines the semiotic resources of discourse for representing the timing of social practices. At the very beginning of this chapter, van Leeuwen points out that a description of these resources will contribute to a better understanding of the fundamental role and power of time in social life. This argument is then supported by the detailed analysis of various semiotic resources for timing (time summons, synchronization, punctuality, exact & inexact timing and unique & recurring timing).

Chapter 5, “Space in discourse,” is concerned with how spaces are represented in discourse as well as in visual images. Van Leeuwen holds the view that “our understandings of space derive from and can be linked directly to social action, to the way in which we use space in acting out social practices” (88). A grammar of space is beneficial to the critical analysis of power. Chapter 6, “The discursive construction of legitimation,” studies four major categories of legitimation (authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization and mythopoesis), since “recontextualization involves not just the transformation of social practices into discourses about social practices, but also the addition of contextually specific legitimations of these social practices” (105). The chapter provides a very useful approach to critically analyzing the construction of legitimation in discourse. Chapter 7, “The discursive construction of purpose,” offers a framework for analyzing how the purposes of social practices are constructed, interpreted, and negotiated in discourse. Van Leeuwen considers that social action is not inherently purposeful, but the construction of purpose is often at the heart of disagreement and conflict. Three types of purpose construction are tackled: goal-oriented action, means-oriented action, and effective action.

In chapter 8, “The visual representation of social actors,” van Leeuwen adapts the framework presented in chapter 2 to visual communication and applies it to visual representations in Western media. In looking at how images depict people, the author discusses two crucial questions, the way people are depicted (exclusion, roles, categorization, etc.) and the relationship between the depicted people and the viewer (social distance, social relation, and social interaction). Chapter 9 “Representing social actors with toys,” explores children’s toys as a semiotic resource for representing social roles and identities in play. Van Leeuwen proposes a Toy Social Actor Network that can be used to “generate questions about how dolls represent the social world” (153).

What distinguishes this book from others on CDA is, first, that it provides comprehensive “grammars” of recontextualization that show in detail how the elements of social practices can be represented and transformed in discourse, and it demonstrates through critical analyses some of the ways in which these grammars are actually used, using materials form children’s books, brochures, and newspaper reports. Second, it incorporates images and other nonlinguistic signifying elements in its analytical system to show that they can be researched in the similar critical methods. Van Leeuwen’s exposition is lucid and highly readable, but owing to his background in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), there are so many SFL terms in the book that a reader without any prior knowledge of SFL may find it difficult. I would recommend that such people read Geoff Thompson’s Introducing functional grammar (Reference Thompson2004) or Halliday’s An introduction to functional grammar (Reference Halliday1994) before they start this book. The system network provided in the form of a table in each chapter is of great help in improving readers’ understanding of various categories employed by the author to elucidate his points.

As the author admits, the project of this book is not yet complete, with certain elements of social practices mentioned in chapter 1 left untouched, such as performance modes, presentation styles, material resources, and eligibility conditions. In addition, multimodal analysis needs to be elaborated, since the study of nonlinguistic representations is still in its infancy. The work, although useful, should be extended and developed. In all, this is a well-written resource book for people who are interested in CDA. Van Leeuwen’s case studies themselves prove to be wonderful demonstrations of how to collect and analyze data. And the methodology presented is especially important in this media-saturated environment where we understand the world mainly through media representations.