Student comments on a professor’s rating as an evaluating speech genre in Russian and American educational discourse

Abstract

This article focuses on the speech genre “student comments on a professor’s rating” which belongs to the domain of quality assurance in higher education. Both aspects are meaningful for the theory of speech genres and the system of higher education. The article analyses the communicative concept “student feedback on teaching” which is related to the speech genre under research. The article also deals with description and comparative analysis of speech genre features of axiological texts which belong to the domain of the “quality of education” in Russian and American linguistic cultures. Apart from this, the article attempts to classify the speech genre forms of students comments on teaching. On the basis of the comparative analysis of the speech genre “student feedback on teaching” in Russian and American education discourse there have been deduced several common and national specific language features and phenomena. The evaluating communicative concept “student feedback on teaching” comprises not only emotional evaluating attitude of the author but also a structural semiotic paradigm of the teaching evaluation. The American concept demonstrates higher semiotic density. The comparative analysis of verbal implementation of the concept in the Russian and American student feedback comments allows to conclude that the corresponding speech genre in American culture looks like an established speech practice, while into Russian culture this genre has been borrowed and is still being formed.

Keywords

• communicative concept
• educational discourse
• quality of education
• speech genre
• feedback
• evaluation
• language identity
• tonality
• evaluating utterances