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ENGLISH ROMANTIC ESSAY AS A SOURCE FOR ACADEMIC ENGLISH LEARNING

O. Anossova, S. Dmitrichenkowa

Abstract

Approaches to teaching English for Academic Purposes in a particular discourse vary from elaborating and creating academic grammar and syntax structures, reading, translating and analyzing academic and scientific papers, listening to conference presentations and university lectures as well as discussing academic and scientific subjects with peers and experts. However, none of the enlisted activities is possible without regular, systematic and laborious vocabulary building, self-discipline and new academic words accumulation. English academic vocabulary is supposed to be learnt directly from the appropriate academic and scientific sources as well as indirectly via reading literary texts optionally incorporated into the Academic English curriculum. The English Romantic essay being a familiar, close and intimate genre remains the genre which was created by the former university graduates able to speak and write Latin, well acquainted with the rhetoric, inspired by any minute daily emotions or serious political shifts and reforms. Romantic essayists reflected and portrayed life streamlines imprinting short instances of friendly conversations and longer periods of university years in their essays. W.Hazlitt, Ch.Lamb, L.Hunt, T.L.Peacock, T.de Quincey, W.Scott created a unique atmosphere of the epoch with their essays. The first scientific explorations, geographic discoveries, public libraries foundation, British economic growth and world expansion, English, Scottish, Irish most cherished customs and traditions, philosophical, political, educational and cultural problems – everything was mirrored by the skillful and talented Romantic essayists’ quill. A relatively short length of the essays, their coherence, integrity, completeness and unity could serve a good example for writing practice in the course of English for Academic Purposes. Students can be motivated to read the specimens comparing the essays published in periodicals with the contemporary internet online blogs whose authors derive their subjects from the current Internet readers’ curiosity and enquiries, which in Romanticism could be associated with the authors’ own subjective views and public interest. Mastering Academic English by students of Engineering Academy or Institute of Physics and Technology is a complicated and long-term goal and it should involve a lot of reading. Why it should not be Romanticism authors? Each of them possessed style, brilliantly used English mixing it with rare but exquisite jewels of Latin and Greek, treasured the national language, literature and culture heritage, which in its turn can be re-searched, restored and renovated in the contemporary global academic/scientific discourses for intercultural, cross-cultural, multicultural and transcultural communication.

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