Abstract:

At the lessons of Business English and ESP, teachers often have to deal with a seemingly irrational situation, when newspaper features and magazine articles on serious economical, political and business-related issues make students smile or even laugh. Humour, irony and sarcasm tend to be used in these previously unconventional communicative and functional spheres of modern English discourse of the press, which clearly signals major transformational changes in the way how media texts are written. Thus, a few very important questions arise: Why do journalists of British and American newspapers use comical elements when they describe various problems in the world of big business? What systemic role do various verbal means of creating humorous effect play in the complex pragma-semantic field of English mass media discourse? The aim of this article is to find the answers which can be extremely helpful in the educational process. Based on the results of functional-linguistic analysis of vast empirical material, a better approach to teaching analytical reading skills can be worked out.

Keywords:

Discourse theory, rhetoric, pragmatics, teaching methodology, humour, irony, sarcasm, reading skills, ESP, mass media.