NEW APPROACHES TO DEVELOPING RESEARCHER’S INITIATIVE OF STUDENTS

Traditionally, higher education is aimed at students’ gaining a certain amount of knowledge and competences as well as carrying out a research in the professional sphere. New challenges of education presume expanding the boundaries of cultural and scientific interests of students, developing their research initiative. The students of the Russian State Social university are involved in research of professional speech communication. The present study is aimed at providing students with reliable methods of analysis of verbal conflicts in professional communication.

Current linguistic researches are increasingly employing the case-based reasoning system to the analysis of human speech, its genres and national peculiarities. Recent developments have demonstrated the advantages of this system. Thus, the students were challenged to find the appropriate instruments to integrate the accumulated experience in analyzing verbal conflicts. The 106 students were divided into four groups in order to study four types of texts in the English language from printed mass media: news concerning recent developments in the Middle East, news about relations between Russia and West, analytical articles about the recent election campaign in the USA, social advertisement texts. The study included three stages. During the first stage the students were given a task to find 20-30 texts on the topic they were to study. This stage was mainly devoted to individual search of text material in mass media. The second stage included five seminars where the students analyzed cases of verbal aggression, verbal persuasion, verbal manipulation. Each group presented a report on these three aspects during a conference organized at the third stage of the study.

The studies have demonstrated the right perspective of employing the quantative method in determining the level of expressiveness of speech in mass media texts. The research has proved the major role of occasional, authorial, metaphors in creating the persuasion impact of a political text or an advertisement. Nowadays advertising is no longer considered as an explicit call to buy some product. The research of the persuasive mechanism of a military advertisement has also demonstrated the great role of implicit information, including appeal to the previous experience and associations, archetypes.

Thus, the students involved in this linguistic research have accomplished a great deal of creative work. To develop their initiative and motivation during the scientific work, the students were encouraged to employ their life and academic experience, to employ the quantative method and association experiment. The case-based reasoning system seems to provide a reasonable solution to a number of problems occurring in interpersonal and international communication. Moreover, it promotes the researcher’s initiative to find and compare precedents, and determine characteristics of verbal conflicts. The case-based reasoning system appears to be an effective instrument of research into verbal communication by developing the students’ creativity and research initiative. The authors are planning to employ further the case-based reasoning system in the studies of verbal conflicts on the material of religious and confessional differences.