Abstract:

The aim of professionally oriented approach to teaching English as a foreign language comprises in itself the formation of language skills and competences which will allow students to perform their professional functions successfully in the future. On the one hand, students must master their command of general English, develop fluency and linguistic accuracy, but, on the other hand, they should acquire the ability to use the foreign language in the professional environment. The combination of these two factors constitutes the basis of the methods and techniques used in teaching professionally oriented English.

Tutors and professors involved in the process of teaching English for specific purposes have to cope with the following task: they should reveal main peculiarities of the professional language which they work with. These characteristics should be analyzed, compared with the linguistic peculiarities in the native language and have to be explained to the students. After this stage the students must practice newly acquired language constructions and word combinations and use then in the models of professionally oriented speech. This approach will allow future lawyers and politicians to sound natural while communicating in professional context.

One of the ways to single out the main linguistic features is to study modern authentic texts of political rally speeches and judicial arguments, which provide first-hand material for linguistic research. When teaching English for specific purposes in the field of politics and law it is significant to incorporate linguistic realities in order to make students’ communicative competence highly demanded in the professional community. Political and judicial discourses constitute sociocultural grounds that tend to change rapidly. Thus, we assume that teaching professionally oriented English requires comprehensive authentic language data that comprises professional corpora. Corpus-based approach to teaching political and judicial English makes students’ speech sound less artificial and helps to overcome cultural and linguistic gaps. While analyzing the current academic programmes, offered by the Russian universities we may state that there is a little room for studying authentic up-to-date linguistic materials within the professional corpora. The identified problem has a negative impact on intercultural communication as it prevents specialists in politics and law from real relevant professional environment.

The objectives of the research we have carried out and the results of which are presented in the article include the following:
1) to make valid comprehensive political and judicial corpora on the basis of pre-election campaign speeches and Supreme Court arguments;
2) to compare and contrast the linguistic means of expressing persuasion in political and judicial speeches;
3) to compare and contrast the ways of expressing solidarity with and separation from the audience within the political and judicial discourses;
4) to suggest a number of variants how to incorporate the results of this research into the process of teaching political and legal English.

Political and judicial corpora are subjected to qualitative and quantitative analyses. The ultimate aim is to describe the linguistic characteristics inherent in modern American political and judicial communication in the English language for the following incorporation into the academic programmes.

Keywords:

Political discourse, judicial discourse, teaching English for specific purposes, corpus linguistics.