We analyze the specific genre of public lectures in English – the TED Talks. Being very popular nowadays these science lectures contain a lot of professionally oriented lexis and are a useful tool to enrich the vocabulary bank and improve listening skills. The characteristic traits of these lectures are briefness, appropriateness, convincingness, clear and rigid structure, careful preparatory work, high extent of the orientation to the audience. The language of TED talks lectures on architecture is characterized by the abundance of professional terms, collocations, expressive means and stylistic devices, such as simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbola etc. Interrogative and imperative forms and personal pronouns are widely used. They help speakers establish the contact with the audience, create the expressive and emotional speech, emphasize the main idea or make listeners think about the important points of the information. The idioms, coarse lexis and lexical repetitions create vivid and meaningful performance. Also we noted the upbeat mood and high emotionality of this genre of public speech.

The article is devoted to the problem of carrying out a proper educational experiment. A critical analysis of the conventional approaches to an educational experiment is given. The author argues that the majority of methods, assessing the results of educational experiments, were borrowed from sociology and psychology which, in turn, led to the misinterpretation of the results of these experiments. The criticism of the author is primarily aimed at the incorrect use of central tendency measures and the selection of tests for checking the probability of significance of samples. The qualitative approach, based on the percentile values, was proposed as one of the most relevant results of an experiment. The lack of universal measure with could allow comparing results of multiple educational experiments and meta-analyses was argued. The term «effective learning hours» was coined. The methodology of defining «effective learning hours» and corresponding them to the levels of the acquisition was proposed.

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