Discourse analysis of media texts about educational system: opportunities of corpus and cognitive research

The article aims to analyse media discourse devoted to the description of distant education during the pandemic COVID-19. Media discourse allows not only to examine the current state of society, but also to study its problems and development prospects. Thus, the purpose of the article is to describe the process of linguistic and cognitive formation of education in the new social conditions. By means of continuous sampling methods, the authors compiled a corpus that consisted of a variety of articles connected to the distance learning organization. The study of the collected material became possible due to the integration of corpus linguistics methods, cognitive analysis and discourse study. As a result, the main thematic patterns that reflected the peculiarities of distant education description in different media texts were identified. Calculation of their percentage allowed to examine significant social changes connected with the public attitude to the new type of educational process. Methods of corpus linguistics made it possible to compile a list of frequent lexical units that form the core of modern media discourse. The analysis of their compatibility and evaluative component identification provided an opportunity to assess the dynamics of their thematic dominant on the lexical level. Using cognitive-discourse analysis, the authors constructed key metaphorical models that illustrated the peculiarities of distance education perception by the representatives of Russian culture. In conclusion, the authors discussed the changes that happened to the modern media discourse dedicated to distant education description in the context of new realities.