A Critical Discourse Analysis of Algeria's Former Minister of Education Nouria Benghabrit-Remaoun's Speeches (2014 – 2019)

Abstract

Algeria’s ministers tend to use a specific jargon to communicate with their audience using humor, incorrect sentences, and word ambiguity. But this jargon has occasionally hidden some ideologies. This led us to investigate how this could possibly apply to the Algerian former Minister of Education Nouira Benghabrit through some of her interviews relying on Norman Fairclough’s (1989) Critical Discourse Analysis model. This work also aims to extract discursive practices and rhetorical techniques used by Benghabrit. The major issue raised is the impact of Benghabrit's language on the Algerian people. The methodological process conducted is an observation of Benghabrit's Youtube videos. In particular, we have selected 11 videos. The analysis starts at the word level, the text level, and moves to the discursive practices. Eventually, we came up to identifying rhetorical techniques and hidden ideologies which obliterated Algerian identity through second-generation reforms. Moreover, the results reveal that Fairclough’s model is suitable and applicable for the analysis of Benghabrit’s speeches since our hypotheses are accepted and confirmed. To conclude, we could observe that her jargon helped her to convey her ideology easily and in a short time while the Algerian people were busy criticizing the way she speaks.