A CORPUS-ASSISTED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF OUT-OF-SCHOOL CHILDREN IN DAWN NEWSPAPER

This study examines the discursive representation of Out-of-School Children (OOSC) in Pakistan through a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis (CACDA) of Dawn newspaper. This study aims to explore how educational exclusion is linguistically constructed in media discourse and also how these representations shape the public understanding of the issue and by combining the quantitative corpus techniques including keyword and collocation analysis with the qualitative concordance analysis this study examines both the frequency and contextual use of language related to OOSC. The findings then revealed that Dawn constructs educational exclusion through three dominant discursive practices like quantification and aggregation, technocratic framing and crisis oriented discourse. The children are primarily represented through large scale statistics which shift the attention from the individual experiences to the abstract representations in numerics. The discourse adopts a technocratic orientation in which the state institutions and policy actors are highlighted while the children are positioned as passive recipients of intervention. The issue is frequently framed as a national crisis and emphasized on the urgency and linked education to broader concerns of development, stability and governance. Overall, the study shows that the media discourse does not neutrally reflect educational reality but it actively constructs it through specific linguistic choices and these representations tend to prioritize institutional and policy perspectives while the lived experiences and structural inequalities behind the educational exclusion remain less visible. This study also contributes to CDA research by showing how Corpus-Assisted methods can uncover the ideological patterns in media texts and it also highlights the need for more human centered reporting on educational inequality in Pakistan. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Out-of-School Children, Media Discourse, Educational Exclusion, Dawn newspaper.