Purpose. Today, new media play a crucial role in legitimating political relations. Theoretical background of the current research draws on the social cognitive approach to discourse studies. From this perspective, legitimization is understood as one of the major ways of establishing social dominance in the process of meaning negotiation. As the meanings in discourse can vary, discourse actors have tools to attribute components of meaning to specific affairs, for instance, political and social. An analysis of the news discourse aims to identify major mechanisms of establishing legitimacy of political decisions conducted by political institutions. The authors describe discursive features of constructing political decisions by applying the method of discourse analysis to the news on Venezuelan crisis, which took place in the winter 2018–2019. Results. As the study of the empirical data demonstrates, the British mass media tend to construct discursive representation of Latin America’s events by introducing of several groups of actors in the news on the Venezuelan crisis. Generally, these groups relate to socio-political hierarchy. They include individual, collective, institutional and international actors. By tracing the elements of their agency in Venezuelan crisis 2019 news, authors assume that their functions in news construction are directly connected to the mechanism of objectivation. Recognizing the informative function of media as one of the major, authors argue that this mechanism also relates to establishing legitimacy in discursive practices. The ways by which the actors of the events in the discourse on Venezuela have been embedded in the articles show the creation of increasingly formed belief in legitimate actions of the new opposition leader. Conclusion. The study contributes to the methods of discourse analysis as well as to the search for legitimization strategies applied by the media. The implications of the study include the comparative analysis of British and Russian new media discourse.

The article analyzes a number of modern characteristics of the information society and shows the need to take into account interdisciplinarity in the formulation of communication strategies. Accounting for the interdisciplinary factor of the strategy is based on the concept of information culture.

The paper addresses the problem of destination image building in the discourse of tourist reviews. Modeling the image of the popular Siberian winter resort Sheregesh is conducted on the material of the Internet websites, a space where tourists increasingly share their posttrip opinions on the place. The study distinguishes the two levels of the tourist destination image construction: macro-textual and micro-textual. Having analyzed the macrostructure of tourist review discourse, authors assume that the micro level of this discourse (particular texts) is partially predetermined by its macro-level organization. The functional attributes, such as nature, climate, ecology, cultural events, sporting activities, infrastructure, human factor constitute cognitive layer of the image. They are discussed by tourists as a part of the website policy and translate the general communicative goal of this type of discourse. A cognitive component of the discourse of opinions co-exists with emotional evaluation. The results of the image reconstruction of the Kuzbass ski resort in the discourses generated by ordinary speakers have implications for further implementation in the sphere of tourism management as well as discourse studies.

Abstract. The paper covers the concept of innovative approaches in education based on incorporating MOOCs options into traditional classroom. It takes a look at the ways higher education instructors working with the mining engineers enrolled in advanced training programmes can brighten, upgrade and facilitate the learning process. The shift of higher education from in-class to online format has changed the learning environment and the methods of teaching including professional retraining courses. In addition, the need of mining companies for managers of a new kind obligates high school retraining centres rapidly move towards the 21 st century skill framework. One of widely recognized innovations in the sphere of elearning is MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that can be used as an effective teaching tool for organizing professional training of managing staff of mining companies within the walls of a university. The authors share their instructional experience and show the benefits of introducing MOOCs options at the courses designed for retraining mining engineers and senior managers of coal enterprises. Though in recent researches the pedagogical value of MOOCs is highly questioned and even negated this invention of the 21 st century can become an essential and truly helpful instrument in the hands of educators.

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