Metaphors and symbols in educational media discourse

The article is devoted to topical issues of metaphorology and the theory of symbolism in media communication. The aim of the work is to identify metaphors and symbols and determine their role in the educational media course. The research aim is achieved by applying a set of the following methods: content analysis, discourse analysis, lexical and semantic analysis, as well as comparative, interpretive and quantitative analysis. Continuous sampling allowed selecting media texts from electronic educational media resources, which formed a corpus of media texts containing metaphors and symbols in the educational media library of Russian, British and American linguistic cultures. Metaphors and symbols have been found to be very common and useful in educational media communication. Their correct linguistic and cultural interpretation in different media genres and media formats of the educational media discourse is particularly difficult. The historical development of metaphors and symbols in educational communication is described, their use in modern educational media formats is analyzed. The main trends and directions in the functional use of metaphors and symbols, their psycholinguistic aspects of perception in the educational media environment are established. The following main functions of metaphors and similes in the Russian, British and American educational media discourse have been identified: procedural, local, instrumental, structural, motivational, competence, integration, differential, cognitive, productive, value, mixed (competence-procedural). The scientific novelty of the study is that it contains a new perspective on the impact of educational media discourse as an educational tool through the prism of metaphors and symbols. In the perspective, it is planned to study the influence of metaphors and symbols on the perception and understanding of educational material in an educational media course.