This paper is dedicated to challenges of transitioning the educational process to online learning. To present an objective analysis the authors have compared the experience of two Russian ...universities – MGIMO University and Samara National Research University in the field of foreign language teaching, in particular professional English. The focus of the paper is on difficulties faced by the faculty and the ways academics coped with them.The authors highlight the specificity and peculiarities of such a complicated form of education as distance e-learning. Comparative analysis of online platforms, which are mostly used for the organization of e-learning, reveals their benefits and major drawbacks. Furthermore, the authors reflect upon how learning material is blended and assimilated in order to form an e-course. As one of acute pressing problems, the complexity of students’ knowledge assessment is described. The goal of the paper predetermined the necessity to carry out a survey to accumulate and summarize data on teachers’ and students’ individual experiences of the newly formed online educational environment. As the survey indicates, both professors and students consider elearning to be a real breakthrough. On the other hand, the authors conclude that currently it can be only an alternative to the more traditional forms of education, since it can’t be relevantenough to teaching various aspects of professional communication at universities.
This article aims to identify the linguistic features of English-language educational discourse in terms of structural, descriptive, semantic, and cognitive-pragmatic analyses. The relevance of the ...study stems from the need to identify trends in the representation of language components in modern grammar textbooks within the communicative-pragmatic paradigm of educational discourse. The authors focus on the linguosynergetic potential of the English grammar textbook “English Grammar in Use” by Raymond Murphy, manifested in changes of certain discourse markers in all five editions. Employing a multimodal discourse analysis methodology, this research scrutinizes the verbal and visual disparities—encompassing graphic elements, letter capitalization, italics, font, and color—that hold pragmatic value and fulfill various roles, from engagement to information conveyance. The authors also investigate the interference of advertising and educational discourses and the small-format nature of texts in this self-study textbook, whose hypertext structure and internal navigational system serve as a surrogate for teacher guidance, thereby performing a directive function. A diachronic analysis of communicative scenarios within the textbook’s exercises reveals the dynamic utilization of interjections, underscoring their importance in creating an emotive-expressive backdrop that facilitates the acquisition of grammatical phenomena, reflective of their real-world application. Thus, in an attempt to represent the features of natural communication and to avoid the use of linguistic terms, the author of the textbook presents complex grammatical material in the most accessible form for a wide audience. Consequently, the study highlights the textbook’s increasing emphasis on the personality-bound component, complementing the traditionally dominant status-oriented approach in educational discourse.
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