Abstract
The recent developments witnessed by Arab states especially after Arab Spring (henceforth AS) have given rise to several questions among which is whether or not these developments have led to a change in the attitude of the Western world countries towards Arab societies including the Arab woman. These questions create an obvious need to find out whether or not the image of the Arab woman has changed after these political and social developments. This study is an attempt to explore the sort of image associated with the Arab Muslim Woman (henceforth AMW) in the English media.
The study is based on the hypotheses that the Arab woman is positively depicted in the English media represented by the British and American media, and that there is no significant difference between these two medias in the degree of their positive attitude towards the Arab woman. To achieve the aims of the study and verify its hypotheses, two types of procedures have been adopted: theoretical and practical. The theoretical procedures consist of presenting a theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA) including its principles, approaches, models of analysis, and some related previous studies. On the other hand, the practical procedures consisting of selecting five British articles from The Independent (IN), and five American articles from The Notion and The Christian Science Monitor (CSM). The selected articles have been analysed in the light of an adopted form of Wodak (2001) and van Dijk’s model (2000). The obtained results have been analysed using suitable statistical tools.
The analysis of the results has shown aclear change in the attitude of the English world towards the AMW who is positively depicted in both British and American Medias. The results have also shown that the American articles seem to manifest higher rates of frequencies and percentages of positive linguistic elements and positive ideologies than the British ones.
The studyends up with a numberof recommendations and suggestions for further research based on the study findings.
