The Department of Language Communication provides students with professional knowledge and builds their language skills in the areas of authorial mass media production, language culture and interactive media creation. Its main mission is to profile graduates‘ communication skills in Slovak and in foreign languages, especially in English, German, Italian, at a high professional level. The members of the department are renowned scientific and pedagogical staff with experience in media and educational practice. They demonstrate excellent results in the educational process and scientific research activities. They deal with research into current issues arising from current mass media and marketing communication from various aspects and methodological approaches: linguistic, pragmalinguistic, sociolinguistic, cultural-linguistic, semantic, narrative, genre, cultural, literary-critical and artistic.
Education
The teachers of the department focus through individual courses on the development of languagen and communication skills both in Slovak and in foreign languages. They lead students to cultivated expression and active mastery of grammar, stylistics, and professional media terminology. Within the profile courses, students acquire theoretical knowledge and practical language skills related to the creation of journalistic genres and their visual or verbal interpretation. The aim of the course is for graduates to master at a professional level various ways of cultivated media expression in both mother tongue and foreign language, to be able to set criteria for effective professional language behaviour, to be able to apply them in various communication situations, to critically evaluate and solve practical language problems.
An important part of teaching is performing in front of a camera and a microphone, (discursive) analysis of media communications and products. Through direct mutual interactions between the teacher and students, as well as between students, the students acquire, develop and strengthen communication skills and cultivate their language and non verbal expression. Technical means of communication enable students to learn language in global information and communication spaces, which creates additional opportunities for the development of their personality, language creativity and communication skills. The teachers of the department largely combine linguistic studies with media, marketing or communication studies, use the procedures and knowledge of media linguistics, interactive media styling, in practical exercises they apply various modern methods and techniques, including social networks designed for teaching and
learning.
Scientific research activity
The members of the department orient their research interest in interdisciplinary ways, focusing primarily on issues in the areas of communication practices, the creation of journalistic genres, and the use of language in the media. They analyze various phenomena from the aspects of linguistic pragmatics, psycholinguistics, media linguistics with a focus on aspects of communication and media, they also deal with various communication situations from cultural and semiotic perspectives.
The priority research goals of the department include research into the functionality and intentionality of the means of expression used in the context of current media discourses, internationalization of language, analysis of linguistic identity of media, political language, verbal expression of professional actors in the media, including research on traditional research topics such as orthography, orthoepy, lexicology , phraseology, grammar, stylistics, language culture and language culture. Based on interdisciplinary approaches, they examine, for example, the effects of information technology implementation on the level of media content, the effects of social networks on language teaching or the phenomenon of political correctness in terms of verbal communication, limiting critical thinking due to different levels of language culture.
The core of the research is thus media or marketing mediated language products, which are examined from different perspectives and in different contexts. The aim of the scientific research activities of the members of the department is to generate knowledge and develop methods that capture the language side of media or marketing communication in all its complexity and with all its aspects with regard to new tasks and features of language communication in the digital environment.
The members of the department are leading researchers and members of scientific research teams within the solution of projects in grant schemes VEGA, KEGA, ESF, they publish monographs, textbooks, scientific studies in renowned domestic and foreign publishers. They co-operate to a significant extent in organizing scientific conferences, as well-founded experts participate in the work of cabinets. The project profiles the department in the field of language diversification and communication in the media and language development tendencies in traditional media and in the Internet environment.
The Department of Language Communication cooperates in the field of science and research with renowned domestic and foreign institutions, such as the Ľudovít Štúr Institute of Linguistics of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Communication Studies of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University in Prague, the Department of Czech Language, Charles University in Prague, Department of Media Studies, Jan Amos Comenius University in Prague, Institute of Foreign Languages, Volgograd State Pedagogical University, and the Department of Media and Communication Studies, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur.