Abstract:

Teaching students to be critical thinkers presumes an environment where learners, building upon their knowledge and experience set, strive to understand how data and information can be used to develop, recognize, and/or critique general patterns of knowledge found in different fields. As journalism is viewed as a source and transporter of the values of the society and «the transfer of knowledge», the study of its language is crucial in attempt to give a comprehensive analysis of the changes in axiological assumptions of the modern society. It’s interesting to note that the success of media is only possible when the published material influences the readers, their motifs, desires, preferences, both in commercial and social paradigm. For this media relies heavily on using communicative strategies.

To distinguish communicative strategies students should be stimulated to consider and critically assess such things in journalism as:
• the choice of the vocabulary (which is semantically charged, the current idiom of the time, the particularities of the formal/informal English);
• imagery (tropes and figures of speech; epithets; symbols, which make the text cohesive; metonymies, metaphors; irony, contrast – to show social processes and their interpretation based on oppositions, antonomasia);
• syntax (inversion, ellipsis, interpolation, parallelism, repetitions, detachments, rhetorical questions).
• caricatures and other visual means.

Studying these, students should resort to observation, comparison and generalization of factual evidence and its classification. There should be a clear understanding of different tactics used in communicative strategies in modern media. The article demonstrates that critical thinking, when developed in context, can be viewed as a road to higher level connections with epistemologies of disciplines.

Keywords:

Critical thinking, imagery, communicative strategies, media, creolized text, caricature, media literacy, metaphor.