Excursion scientific academic discourse and its genre characteristics

The modern paradigm of education of the Russian Federation is characterized by internationalization and academic mobility. These processes require of students and graduates of universities a good command of a foreign language and a mastery of the academic discourse. Along with their professional competencies, future professionals should be able to communicate with their colleagues in academic and research fields, as well as create their own original products of speech activity in English as a language of international communication. In this paper, an excursion scientific academic discourse and a scientific excursion are considered, their essence is theoretically justified, their genre characteristics are determined. The methodological basis of the study is the idea of the dialectical relationship between language, thinking and culture; a set of the selected approaches makes it possible to gain an in-depth understanding of the phenomenon of excursion scientific academic discourse and determine its place in the system of scientific discourse. In our study, we define discourse as a text embracing extra-linguistic, pragmatic, sociocultural, psycholinguistic and other discourse factors which are important for foreign language communication in verbal and non-verbal implementation. We also consider discourse as information space of a society, and as a discrete unit - the text in a discursive environment. The carried out analysis of literature has enabled us to establish that scholars propose different definitions of the notion ‘scientific and academic discourse'. It has been found out that many researchers implement an integrated approach to the definition of the scientific academic discourse and consider the academic discourse as a kind of institutional communication in the context of science and higher education. In our research, we consider the scientific academic discourse as an integrative concept combining the features of scientific and academic types of discourses due to the interpenetration, intersection and coincidence of the components of these discourses. To describe the excursion scientific academic discourse, we examined its components: 1) participants; 2) a chronotope; 3) goals; 4) strategies; 5) material (subject matter); 6) kinds and genres; 7) precedent texts; 8) discursive formulas. On the basis of these characteristics, the authors describe a scientific excursion as a specific genre of scientific academic discourse and identify its features in the context of the English language-related oral discourse and its organizational and methodological requirements. Finally, conclusions about the essence of the excursion scientific academic discourse, its general and specific characteristics associated with a certain sphere of human activity were drawn. Due to the diffuseness that causes interpenetration of various discourse features, the introduced excursion scientific academic discourse is defined as a subdiscourse of the scientific discourse which tends to oral communication realized in the conditions of publicity in the scientific and academic fields. The scientific excursion is represented as a specific form of active teaching English as a foreign language, requiring a methodologically prepared and organized display of scientific and technical achievements, based on an analysis of the objects of recent research endeavour in science and technology demonstrated to the excursionists. In the theoretical and practical aspects, the excursion as a type of scientific academic discourse in teaching a foreign language is regarded as a type of oral communication focused on up-to-date scientific knowledge and skillful presentation of the research and scientific and technical activities with the use of adequate linguistic and sociocultural means of communication in English.

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