Reading skills development of Master’s Degree Students in “International Relations” programme (based on Mass Media articles)

We pay attention to the two competing trends within each functional style; note the terminological diversity when naming publicistic style. We analyze pragmatic and semantic peculiarities of the mass information language. We substantiate the expediency of using informational and analytical Mass Media texts as the linguistic material in classes with Master’s Degree Students in “International Relations” programme of Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. We pay attention to the professional and communicative competencies which should be acquired by students while mastering the “Foreign language of professional activity” discipline. We focus on the need to comply with meaningful and linguistic criteria in the selection of authentic texts for Master’s Degree Students. On the example of articles from the magazine “The Economist”, we consider the system of exercises and tasks for the professional-oriented reading skills development among students for more effective reading skills teaching. We differentiate the terms “exercise” and “task”, as well as “skim reading” and “reading for detail”. We substantiate the expediency of methodical processing of Mass Media texts in accordance with the linguistic level of Master’s Degree Students. We prove the necessity of system compliance of pre-text, text and after-text tasks and exercises based on the texts on the topic: “Migration: causes, problems and ways of solving it”. We give a generic list of tasks and exercises taking into account the three-stage system.

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