Università Roma Tre

The course is intended for students enrolled at the Master’s degree in Publishing and Journalism and aims at developing critical discourse analysis skills related to ESP in the field of Journalism and Media. Lessons focus on the various communicative practices that characterize the discursive community of journalism and media, as well as the various genres and the possible intertextual relationships. Lessons also aim attention at the exploration, conceptual interpretation and sociocultural explanation of the linguistic features exploited in the texts for traditional and digital media. In relation to the different journalism areas and text-types, special attention will be paid to the following categories:



• How to analyse the language of journalism: The development of Critical Discourse Analysis.
• Forms of communication in traditional media: The discursive community, shared values and point of view; the language of the press, radio and television; advertising; types of newspapers and politics; media genres; broadcast journalism: managing the extraordinary and the ordinary; forms of language and voices in news broadcasting; magazine journalism and linguistic strategies of synthetic personalization; newspaper journalism: popular and quality styles.
• The social environment of contemporary communication: new models of communication in the Age of the Internet; the constituents of modern digital communication; properties of web communication and web genres; online journalism: live news writing; citizen journalism: practices and identities.
• Participants in the discourse of journalism: roles, relationships and identities; personal identity, social identity and identification; power and community; stance and style; audience, politeness, accommodation; texts and social structures; intertextuality; agency and power; news values, balance and bias; conflict, proximity/cultural relevance.

• The linguistic individual in media communication: media and identity in a communicational frame; history, culture and memory in press coverage; authorial identity and the audience; reader positioning and ethics; inclusion/exclusion.
• Discourse styles and structures: parts and sequences; discourse organisation; depersonalization; nominalisation; evidentiality, coherence and cohesion; genres, gender stereotypes and discourse styles; narrative, gender and personal stories; gender, irony and taboo language; structures and lexical choices of news stories.


• Features of argumentation and dissemination in journalism and media discourse: rhetorical devices, dissemination strategies, defence strategies and legitimation techniques; ideology and power; persuasion and evaluation; conversational and emotional language in traditional and digital media; engagement features.


LEARNING OUTCOMES: The course aims at developing critical discourse analysis skills related to ESP in the field of Journalism and Media. Students will be offered to explore an extensive variety of texts used in the field of journalism and media.
KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING: At the end of the course, students are expected to show an adequate understanding of the discourse of journalism, as well as to identify its main discursive features and sociocultural context.
APPLYING KNOWLEDGE AND UNDERSTANDING: Students will be required to develop analytical skills in journalistic discourse, and autonomously elucidate genre- and community-based language typicalities.