The article considers the peculiarities of interaction of depictive and verbal modes in media texts on acute problems. The choice of the topic is conditioned by the situation that has developed in the media discourse of modern journalism. Visual methods of information transfer are beginning to gain more and more importance. The pictorial components of the message start to enter into a complex relationship with the verbal text, which in journalism contains many rhetorical methods. Due to this, the visual component acquires rhetorical connotations and increasingly shows an independent rhetorical potential. Of greatest interest for the study of multimodal rhetoric is the situation when the literal representation of an object turns out to be difficult and forces one to seek creative solutions, forming the individual potential of discourse. This happens in publications on acute social issues. As theoretical and methodological foundations, the most relevant are the conceptual developments of the classics of semiotics, who in their researches studied structural characteristics of visual codes and the interaction of these codes with the verbal text. Also of great interest are the theories of modern scientists working in the mainstream of discourse analysis and semiotics. The authors of the article follow this trend of a multimodal approach and, while analyzing representative examples, identify rhetorical techniques through which the sender of a multimodal message seeks to attract the attention of the audience and make the statement more convincing.

In the present article, the relevant alterations in schoolchildren's media educational training is discussed. A couple of questionnaires (initial and final) were conducted to recognize the objective assessment of the media school functioning, according to the methodology developed by Fedorov, 2004. The results from the initial and final assessments demonstrate the working effectiveness of the media school. It is suggested that media education is a compulsory element in the conceptual core of the University discourse.

The paper discusses several advantages of multimodal approach to the analysis of nature and specifics of media audience’s reception of texts. The authors base their ideas on the principally multimodal nature of media communication, which reflects in the way the recipients interpret texts. Thus, various factors impact on the interpretation of the initialized text. Moreover, such factors predominately include other semiotic resources that are not formally affiliated with the basic text. In the research, the hypothesis was about the impact of verbal comments on interpretation of visual objects by recipients. According to this goal, the authors selected two groups of respondents — a control and an experimental one, which were offered a photograph and were asked to describe it verbally in a free manner. The experimental group of respondents was offered the same photograph with motivating verbal comment, including the general information about the origins and topics of the photograph. The authors compared the results of the both groups descriptions by matching verbalized categories of representation, individual evaluations of the photograph and “the syntax” of verbal description of the visual media text. The research results proved the general supposition: the multimodal approach, being aimed at finding, describing and explicating the meaning effects of semiotic ensembles, contributes to understanding the features of interpretation of visual objects under the influence of other semiotic (here — verbal) resources. Thus, the results show that the interpretation of visual objects is motivated by the verbal comment: it topicalizes and contextualizes the visual reception and interpretation of the basic message. In the conclusion, the authors define the perspectives both of the research and the multimodal approach to media texts study.