Abstract:

Russian teachers of English as a language of international business and professional communication often find it difficult to develop basic rhetorical skills of their students. This problem is connected with the asymmetry of cognitive-discursive mechanisms of representatives of different cultures in the process of cross-cultural interaction. Teaching practice proves that future translators, interpreters, economists, diplomats and specialists in business relations, who are non-native speakers, don’t know how to identify and properly react to sarcasm, veiled hints and implications, overabundance of stylistically unjustified expressive verbal means and other signs of speech manipulation even in their native Russian language, let alone English which they study as a foreign tongue. That is why it is pivotal to develop skills that will allow students to successfully perceive full spectrum of the pragma-semantic field of persuasive rhetoric. This article is about how to solve this problem due to the holistic approach to the complexity of systemic linguistic means responsible for the pragmatic impact.

Keywords:

Discourse theory, rhetoric, pragmatics, teaching methodology, ESP, systemic approach, functional linguistics.