Subject Teacher's German Video Blog: Genre and Media Characteristics

This study investigates the linguacultural, genre-specific, and media characteristics of the educational video blog “Einfach Deutsch lernen — Learn German with Ida” as a presentation-oriented, personality-focused internet macrogenre with predominant institutional intentions. The transformative potential of mediatization and its manifestations in pedagogical discourse are characterized. Structural-semantic, stylistic, pragmatic, and media features of the video blog are described. The interface of the genre, composition, thematic-rhematic organization of videoposts, interactive elements, and hypertextuality are analyzed. Principles and techniques for adapting instructional texts to target audiences, kinetic means, precedent phenomena, introduced methodological subtexts, communicative strategies, tactics, and moves by the blogger are examined. Distinctive features of how subject teacher bloggers structure their informational content are presented, determined by chosen principles and methods of material adaptation, schematic thematic-rhematic organization of statements, integration of kinetic means and precedent phenomena into specific functional roles, prevalence of internal hypertextuality, and extensive inclusion of methodologically informed speech acts by the blogger. It is concluded that within this genre, equally important are the blogger’s informative-argumentative, manipulative-consolidating, expressive-appealing communicative actions, while control-evaluative strategy proves less productive.