Semantic Structure of the Lexical Unit Educational Management in Modern English (on the Basis of Corpora BNC and COCA)

Abstract

Abstract:The aim of the present research is to identify semantic structure of the lexical unit educational management in the modern English language on the basis of corpora British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). For achieving the purpose of the research, several objectives have been stated: 1) to single out all the samples and frequency of the lexical unit educational management occurrence in BNC and COCA; 2) to consider all the varieties of meaning of the analyzed lexical unit; 3) to identify lexico-semantic variants (LSVs) composing semantic structure of the lexical unit educational management in the modern English language. The research also shows some proofs for the English language being a lingua franca of modern Europe. Keywords: English language, educational management, modern English, semantic structure. IntroductionHigher education has always been of great importance for people who want to find a well-paid job, succeed in their career life and get to the top of the career ladder. Nowadays, the situation remains unchanged, and knowledge a person acquires while studying at a higher educational institution (HEI) is thought to be a key to prosperity.However, the 21 st century is characterized by an absolutely new approach to higher education. Since the beginning of implementation of the Bologna process principles in European universities in 1999, which is aimed at «introducing a system of academic degrees that are easily recognizable and comparable, promoting the mobility of students, teachers and researchers, ensuring high quality teaching and incorporate the European dimension into higher education and creating a European Higher Education Area» (The Bologna process: setting up the European Higher Education Area 2010), the European countries have been making efforts to correspond to the new demands and make their HEIs compatible at the global arena of higher education. As a consequence, these changes are contributing to emergence of a number of some other issues to be discussed.Firstly, these changes lead to altering the system of managing higher education. A field of study that investigates the peculiarities of running the whole system of higher education and a HEI as such is called educational management. It should be noted that there are a plenty of papers dedicated to the study of educational management as a science. Having analyzed the works of British (Bush, 2008;William, 2003), American (Mintzberg, 1994), German (Decker, 1995;Graumann, 2004), Ukrainian (Demchuk, 2007) and Russian (Ivanov et al., 2010) researchers, we may state that this notion is used in different field of study: pedagogics, psychology, economics, marketing and legal studies. However, traditionally educational management is defined as "a process and system of running a higher education institution aimed at providing its competitiveness at the internal and external market of educational services due to the quality of educational process and preparation of specialists, high level of professi...