Auto-redirect paused manually.
SHAPING ADVICE THROUGH ENGLISH: A CRITICAL DISCOURSEANALYSIS OF AUNTIE AGNI’S ADVICE COLUMN IN DAWNNEWSPAPER | Journal of Applied Linguistics and TESOL (JALT)
Abstract
Abstract
Advice columns constitute influential sites of everyday meaning-making, where language mediates personalguidance, social norms, and cultural values. This study offers a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ofAuntie Agni, a popular advice column published in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper,to examine how advice is linguistically and ideologically constructed through Pakistani English. Drawingon Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA, the study analyses 52 advice columns published betweenJanuary and December 2025 at the levels of text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice. At thetextual level, the findings show that advice is framed through direct address, soft modality, evaluativereassurance, metaphor, humour, and culturally embedded idioms, constructing an empathetic and nonauthoritarian advisory voice. Discursively, the column blends therapeutic, religious, moral, andeducational discourses, positioning the columnist as an expert–friend who negotiates authority throughintimacy rather than prescription. At the sociocultural level, the analysis reveals how the column engageswith key Pakistani social concerns, including family authority, gender norms, marriage, mental healthstigma, education pressure, and class anxiety, not by rejecting them outright but by subtly reinterpretingand renegotiating them. Situated within the framework of World Englishes (2009), the study demonstratesthat Pakistani English in Auntie Agni functions as a localized, culturally resonant variety used foremotional counselling and moral guidance rather than as a marker of elite or Western identity. Byforegrounding advice discourse as a neglected media genre in Pakistani English scholarship, this studyfills an important empirical and theoretical gap, showing how newspaper advice columns operate as sitesof ideological, emotional, and cultural pedagogy in contemporary Pakistan.
Advice columns constitute influential sites of everyday meaning-making, where language mediates personalguidance, social norms, and cultural values. This study offers a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) ofAuntie Agni, a popular advice column published in Dawn, Pakistan’s leading English-language newspaper,to examine how advice is linguistically and ideologically constructed through Pakistani English. Drawingon Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of CDA, the study analyses 52 advice columns published betweenJanuary and December 2025 at the levels of text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice. At thetextual level, the findings show that advice is framed through direct address, soft modality, evaluativereassurance, metaphor, humour, and culturally embedded idioms, constructing an empathetic and nonauthoritarian advisory voice. Discursively, the column blends therapeutic, religious, moral, andeducational discourses, positioning the columnist as an expert–friend who negotiates authority throughintimacy rather than prescription. At the sociocultural level, the analysis reveals how the column engageswith key Pakistani social concerns, including family authority, gender norms, marriage, mental healthstigma, education pressure, and class anxiety, not by rejecting them outright but by subtly reinterpretingand renegotiating them. Situated within the framework of World Englishes (2009), the study demonstratesthat Pakistani English in Auntie Agni functions as a localized, culturally resonant variety used foremotional counselling and moral guidance rather than as a marker of elite or Western identity. Byforegrounding advice discourse as a neglected media genre in Pakistani English scholarship, this studyfills an important empirical and theoretical gap, showing how newspaper advice columns operate as sitesof ideological, emotional, and cultural pedagogy in contemporary Pakistan.