Control Questions

1. What are the standardising grammatical features of broadcast media discourse?

2. Name the expressive grammatical peculiarities typical of broadcast media discourse. Why are they used by broadcast media discourse?

3. Name all the grammatical means to express the future action employed by broadcast media.

Practical Tasks

Task 1. Subfolder GRAMMAR (in Folder Unit 13) contains 25 audio and video files reflecting grammatical features of the broadcast media discourse.

Analyse files No 1-8, 24, 25 in the subfolder GRAMMAR and define what grammatical feature each file reflects. Put them down to discuss in class. Be sure to write down only a sentence fragment (not the whole transcript) containing the grammatical phenomenon in question.

Task 2. Study the following word list.

recession	retails
economic recovery	construction industry
the third quarter of the year (Q III)	data
public sector	to revise something down
public sector borrowing	output (industrial)
the Office for National Statistics (ONS)	the long-term average
the City	GDP
the retail sector	production sector

Read the newspaper article extract. What genre is the piece? Prove your point.

Get ready to translate the material in class.

Uk’s official economic growth estimates revised down

Britain’s economy grew less rapidly than thought over the past nine months,

raising fears over the strength of the UK’s recovery from recession

Graeme Wearden

The Office for National Statistics revised down its previous estimate for GDP growth between July and September to 0.7 %, from 0.8 %. It also cut its estimate for annual growth in the UK economy during the quarter to 2.7 %, from 2.8 %, which remains above the long-term average.

But with Britain’s public sector borrowing hitting a record high yesterday, today's revisions did disappoint some in the City – sending the pound down to a three-month low of $1.5426 against the dollar.

The ONS said the construction, services and production sectors had all shown slower growth than originally thought in the third quarter of 2010. It also revised down the output of business services and finance companies.

Today’s data showed that imports grew faster than exports in the last quarter, dealing a blow to hopes that Britain was exporting its way to recovery.

Economists warned that economic growth will continue to slow in the current quarter, especially given the disruption caused by the recent bad weather.

Philip Shaw of Investec agreed that GDP growth has softened in the last three months, but added that GDP growth for 2010 will still exceed most expectations at the start of the year.

The Guardian, December 22, 2010

Task 3. Watch Video 34 and get its major idea.

Task 4. Watch the video again and transribe it.

Task 5. Draw up a list of verbs defining the current state of the UK economy. Recollect what the term double-dip recession mean.

Task 6. Identify an idiom in Video 34. Say whether there any clichés in the material. What grammatical construction does the last sentence of the brief contain?

Task 7. Study the word list in the box and listen to the lead of Audio Track 12.

rating Credit Rating Agency

national income recovery

global economic environment to boost

outstanding (as an economic term) rate of growth

What new information does the lead contain as compared with Video 34?

Task 8. Listen to the lead again. Unravel its ‘5W and H’ pattern.

Task 9. Listen to the rest of Audio Track 12. What is the context in which the following terms are used? Translate them into Russian. What do the realia in the box above mean?

1. a … double-dip recession;

2. … strong growth;

3. that … was boosted;

4. The … rate of growth;

5. the … 1-3… “Standard and Poor’s”;

6. … “A rating”;

7. uncertain …1… economic …2… ;

8. …1-2… equipment;

9. the … ;

10. outstanding 200 … ;

11. healthy … of … ;

12. so … income is still a long way.

Task 10. Which of the sentences and word combinations in Task 9 are emotionally charged? Put forward your arguments. By what means is the emotion conveyed?

Can you identify any clichés in the piece?

Task 11. Find phrasal verbs in Audio Track 12 and close the gaps:

a) to …….. back; b) to ……… off.

In what context are the verbs used in the report? Are they colloquial or neutral?

Task 12. What can you say about the stylistic features of the report in general? What adjectives are used in the piece? Make a list of them.

Task 13. Study the italicised terms in the newspaper article fragment below. Read the material, determine its genre.