Online review of a children's book:
towards genre openness in English-language media texts
The article presents the results of a systematic study of English-language media texts – contemporary online reviews of children’s books. The relevance of the work is determined by the transformation of the review genre in the digital media environment and the need to systematize the identified genre forms of review. The results are significant both for the theory of media linguistics and for the practice of media communications, as they reveal the communicative dynamics of the genre and effective strategies for interacting with the audience. An analytical review of the selected empirical material allowed us to obtain new typological generalizations of genre implementations of English-language texts: a review of a single work (an expanded analytical text); a review in a thematic collection (a description of 2-3 books on a similar topic with an emphasis on the visual component); an overview from brief reviews (laconic reviews with a navigational function). The methodological prerequisite for the study was most often a balance of structural-functional and concrete-hermeneutic (content-analytical) paradigms. As a result, this allowed us to identify the patterns of online review construction, clarifying its structural, genre-specific, and open nature (based on the communicative foundation of English speech culture). The genre status of contemporary online English-language children's book reviews, as argued, has a positive communicative dynamic: following the focus on finding successful communication with the audience of the book being analyzed, forms of active presentation of material (focused primarily on the target structures of the expected reader response) are proliferating.
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