Abstract:

One of the foreground aspects of teaching English for cross-cultural and professional communication, ESP and Business English is the development of very specific skills allowing non-native students to fully understand the whole pragma-semantic spectrum of the utterance, recognize and properly react to speech manipulation both in oral and written discourse. Such competence is formed by integration of elements of functional-linguistic analysis into the educational process. This analysis helps students see the complex web of functional ties and relations between speech elements that emerge when cooperative pragmatic effect of persuasion is being generated. It is important to study the problem of cooperative (or synergetic) rhetoric from the viewpoint of getting an insight into the discursive mechanisms of communication in English and improving current approaches to teaching a foreign language. Reading articles, published in British and American newspapers and magazines, is an integral part of many classroom activities. That is why the focus should be on a special interdiscursive sphere that combines typical linguistic features of modern English press and texts on business, economy and political issues. Studies of mass media discourse are relevant to the needs of millions of professionals who have to receive a lot of data on a daily basis, and very often this information is tinted with either explicit or implicit evaluative semantic components. The main goal of journalists is to create special pragmatic effect which may serve as a cognitive premise for direct and indirect impact on readers. This article is about using functional-linguistic methodology to teach students to detect verbal means of manipulation and persuasion, avoiding their influence when necessary.

Keywords:

Discourse, mass media, rhetoric, pragmatics, functional linguistics, teaching methodology.