- •Contents
- •Preface
- •Part I. Print media Unit 1 mass media: general notion
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •It’s wrong to portray fathers as domestic incompetents – but women still
- •Unit 2 newspaper headlines and their linguistic peculiarities
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Unit 3 lexical features of newspaper articles
- •Names of some organisations, establishments, parties
- •Abbreviations
- •Acronyms
- •Neologisms
- •Colloquial words
- •Shortened words
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Former Mandela Fund Official Says Model Gave Him Diamonds
- •The International Herald Tribune, August 6, 2010
- •A. Too many clichés, at the end of the day
- •B. Social class affects white pupils’ exam results more than those of ethnic minorities – study
- •C. Blair’s job was done by 1997: to numb Labour, and to enshrine Thatcherism
- •In Downing Street, Blair never fulfilled his early promise and let Brown in.
- •Question time in Oldham Data profiling is helping Oldham police analyse the work of its community support officers
- •Airport and station get walk-in nhs centres
- •People's peers take back seat in the Lords
- •Not off to uni? What an excellent idea...
- •VIII Welsh Assembly launches £44m learning grants
- •4. Three men jailed for rape in Oxford after victim sees film on mobile.
- •Unit 4 grammatical and syntactical properties of newspaper articles
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Cronyism alert on plan for more people’s peers
- •Revealed: Queen’s dismay at Blair legacy
- •Victim / radiation / in £50m drugs / cancer / is denied
- •Unit 5 feature articles: essence, structure, lexical means, stylictic properties
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks Task 1. Read Article a and comment on its genre. What sphere of public life does it reflect? a. After 40 years, the terrorists turn to politics
- •In the East Belfast Mission hall, the uvf, uda and Red Hand Commando announced they had put weapons “beyond use”
- •С. A slice of Middle England Ruaridh Nicoll journeys in search of the perfect pork pie and finds himself seduced by the olde worlde charms of... Leicestershire
- •D. Gordon Brown: There is life after No 10
- •In his first major interview since losing the election, the former Prime Minister tells Christina Patterson why he’s thriving as a constituency mp – and happily living without the trappings of power
- •Unit 6 analytical genres of print media: editorial, op-ed, column, lte
- •I. Editorial
- •III. Сolumn
- •IV. Letters to the editor
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •How Not to Fight Colds
- •The New York Times, October 4, 2010
- •Clean and Open American Elections
- •It’s our class, not our colour, that screws us up
- •Task 12. Read the two ltEs below. What motive was behind writing those letters?
- •I. Giving an Edge to Children of Alumni
- •The New York Times, October 4, 2010
- •II. Childhood misery
- •Task 13. Read the two letters again, and observe the difference between them. What arguments does the author of first letter put forward to drive his message across?
- •Unit 7 print media: revision
- •Task 3. Read the article below and define its genre. What are the constituent parts of the text? House prices: Heading south
- •I was a terrible teenage drinker – I couldn't get hold of alcohol How do young people drink so much today? And how do they get served, asks Michael Deacon
- •Task 7. Read the article below and say what genre it is. Translate the italicised words and word combinations, analyse them. Twitter: Bad sports
- •Test 1. Print media
- •Variants 1-16.
- •Part II. Broadcast media Unit 8 learning to understand broadcast media texts
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Unit 9 learning to differentiate broadcast media news and analytical genres
- •The press conference and the statement are an integral part of the live reporting and are not accompanied by the news presenter’s comments.
- •Fragments of the press-conference, the statement, as well as the parliamentary debate could be quoted in the video brief news, the report and the commentary that are part of the news bulletin.
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Audio Track 6
- •Audio Track 7
- •Bonfire of the quangos? It’s more like a barbecue: Despite all the fanfare, just 29 will be completely abolished
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •A shot in the arm – поиск наркотика; стимул (перен.) a soft touch – обходительный человек; pie in the sky – журавль в небе, пустые посулы
- •He wants the Scottish government to give a shot in the arm to the tourist industry (Sky News)
- •A flop – unsuccessful film or play gazumping – cheating a potential buyer of a house
- •Nifty – very good or attractive (nifty fifties – «золотой возраст»)
- •Some examples of former slang words to booze – to drink alcohol
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Unit 12 stylistic and syntactical peculiarities of broadcast media discourse
- •Control Questions
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Hungarians battle to hold back toxic sludge spill from Danube
- •Vessel mishap
- •Test 2. Lexical and syntactical propertires of broadcast media discourse
- •Variants 1-16.
- •In class:
- •In class:
- •Unit 13 grammatical properties of broadcast media discourse
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Uk’s official economic growth estimates revised down
- •Austerity won’t trigger double-dip recession, economists say
- •Ireland’s economic outlook worsens
- •Ireland’s economic outlook worsened on Monday as the country’s central bank
- •Unit 14 learning to work with broadcast media texts
- •Sun turns its back on Labour after 12 years of support
- •General election 2010: did it really happen?
- •The coalition government: Sweetening the pill
- •Test 3. Morphological properties of broadcast media discourse
- •Variants 1-16.
- •In class:
- •Unit 15 regional accents of british broadcast media (scottish, welsh, irish)
- •Control Questions
- •Practical Tasks
- •Unit 16 broadcast media: revision
- •Murder rate at lowest for 20 years
- •Rogue Trader at Société Générale Gets Jail Term
- •The Guardian, October 5, 2010 Task 9. Find special terms in the second half of the material (they are not marked). Read the piece again, find clichés and idioms in it.
- •Task 38. Read the article below and say what crime is reflected in it. What are its underlying reasons?
- •Sham marriages on “unprecedented scale”
- •Final test on mass media discourse
- •Variants 1-16.
- •In class:
- •In class:
- •References
- •Учимся понимать и интерпретировать медийные тексты на английском языке
Part I. Print media Unit 1 mass media: general notion
Communication can be regarded on two levels:
- personal communication (sharing information by speaking, writing, or other methods);
- sending messages to a large audience. That type of communication is called m a s s c o m m u n i c a t i o n. Books are one of the oldest methods of mass communication, and television is one of the newest. Newspapers and radio are the other ways to send information to many people. Mass media, thereby, denotes a section of the media specifically designed to reach a large audience. The term mass media was coined in the 1920s with the advent of nationwide radio networks, mass-circulation newspapers and magazines.
Mass media exists in the following f o r m s:
- print media (newspapers, magazines and journals);
- broadcast media (radio and television);
- electronic media (electronic papers and other publications posted in the Internet).
The f u n c t i o n s of mass media are:
- to inform a wide audience about the current events,
- to suggest and often to impose their possible interpretation of the event,
- to share an opinion about them with a contemporary.
Mass media, thereby, plays a crucial role in forming and reflecting public opinion, connecting the world to individuals and reproducing the self-image of society.
A newspaper is a publication devoted chiefly to presenting and commenting on the news. Newspapers have certain advantages over the other major news media – television, radio, and news magazines. For example, newspapers can cover more news and in much greater detail – than can television and radio news bulletins.
There are two major sizes of newspapers – standard and tabloid.
A standard-sized newspaper has pages that measure about 60 cm by 38 cm. It is also called a b r o a d s h e e t (or a quality paper). The major United Kingdom quality papers are The Times, The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The Financial Times. The main US quality papers are The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The USA Today. The Globe and Mail, The National Post are the major Canadian broadsheets (or heavies). In autumn 2010 The Indepenent launched The I – a quality paper of a tabloid format.
The pages of a t a b l o i d are about half the size of a quality paper – at 38 cm by 30 cm. They are The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Expres, The Daily Mail, The Sunday Express, The Sunday Mirror (in the United Kingdom), The National Enquirer, The Star Magazine, The New York Post (in the USA). In Britain tabloids are known as popular papers (or pops).
There is also a B e r l i n e r or midi format: 47 cm by 31,5 cm. European papers such as Le Monde (France), La Stampa (Italy), El Pais (Spain) and, since 2005, The Guardian (the United Kingdom).
The standard and tabloid sizes are both used in publishing all types of newspapers.
The three main kinds of papers are:
- daily newspapers,
- weekly newspapers,
- special-interest newspapers (they print news of concern to particular groups).
The papers may also be national (all of the mentioned above) or international (such as The International Herald Tribune) that always focus on international issues.
Newspaper style may be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community speaking one language as a separate unity that serves the purposes of informing and instructing the reader.
There exist two schools of thought on the newspaper style, represented by the Western and Russian schools.
The first approach lists genres of newspaper writing into two large groups. They are news articles and analysis articles (or analytical articles). The first group encompasses two genres – news articles proper and brief news items. The second group embraces five major genres:
- a feature article,
- an editorial,
- a column,
- an op-ed (opposite the editorial),
- letters to the editor.
Russian linguists (I. Galperin being one of them) list the following newspaper genres: brief news and communiqués; editorials; press reports; articles purely informative in character; advertisements and announcements.
Genres of print media
News articles generally follow an inverted pyramid structure for conveying information about a current event, incident, or issue of public interest.
The first sentence of the article, or the lead, gives the most important facts (Who? What?), and the following paragraphs present, in descending order of importance, the details of the event, incident, or issue (Where? When? How? Why?).
The format is valued because readers can leave the story at any point and understand it, even if they don’t have all the details.
A news article strives to remain objective and uses neutral language while presenting a diversity of opinions, voices, and perspectives of the event, incident, or issue under discussion.
The function of brief news items is to inform the reader. They state only facts without giving comment. The bulk of their vocabulary is neutral and common literary.
A feature story (a feature article, or simply a feature) is less time-sensitive than news articles, and may describe selected issue in-depth (people, places, or events of general interest to the public).
As print media faces ever stiffer competition from other sources of news, feature stories are becoming more common as they can be more engaging to read. In many newspapers, news stories are sometimes written in feature style, adopting some of the conventions of feature writing while still covering breaking events.
An editorial is an intermediate phenomenon between the newspaper style and the publicistic style. The function of the editorial is to influence the reader by giving interpretation of certain facts or commentaries on political and social events and happenings of the day.
An op-ed is an abbreviation representing opposite the editorial (page). Op-eds are written for newspaper publication and present the writer's opinion on an issue of current public interest. They are concise enough to appear in 2-3 columns of a standard newspaper, and therefore are sharply focused. Unlike editorials, op-eds are always signed.
A column is a recurring piece or article written by a columnist. It meets each of the following criteria: a) it is a regular feature in a publication; b) it is personality-driven by the author; c) it explicitly contains an opinion or point of view.
Letters to the editor (sometimes abbreviated LTTE or LTE), is a piece of writing (e.g. a letter) sent to a publication about issues of concern from its readers. Like op-eds, they present the writer’s opinion on a current topic, and may be based on personal expertise or on research.
The news article formal structure
Every news article comprises the following formal components – a headline, a lead and a by-line.
The headline is placed at the top of the article and indicates its nature. It is followed by a lead (the first sentence of the article that gives the most important facts). The lead is followed by a by-line – the name of the writer of a news story, feature article, or special column.
In some newspapers there are two or more headlines to one article. The second headline is called a subhead.