Material of mass media in the Russian National Corpus: teaching potential

Abstract

The article examines the possibilities of using mass media materials from the Russian National Corpus for educational purposes. It is emphasized that of special interest are the properties specific for certain types of text as they best demonstrate particular linguistic phenomena. The features of mass media that prioritize choosing them as speech material are 1) the mobility of vocabulary, 2) the importance of stylistic functions over stylistic means (the out of ordinary use of means of other styles), 3) atypical syntagmatics. Particularly effective for the formulation of research tasks in the educational sphere will be the tasks 1) of demonstrating language phenomena in diachrony (for example, the formation of a portable value, the formation of idioms), 2) of observing the ratio of direct and portable meaning in texts of different styles in synchrony, 3) of analyzing the lexical collocations and compatibility. The didactic potential of the materials in the Russian National Corpus is demonstrated through the analysis of phenomena of various nature. The proposed search strategy, in particular, makes it possible to compare the methods of syntactic presentation of a significant element of the textual structure, i.e. the title. By modeling teaching and research situations it is also shown how work with the journalese and the collocations common in mass media can be arranged. To illustrate the dependence of language use on the sphere of use, a comparative analysis of search results in the Newspaper and Main Corpus is proved to be productive. Viewing media texts through the lens of computer technologies leaves no questions as to their potential in teaching. This refersto a wide range of subjects within the humanities.