ИСТИНА

What young people are thinking about now? What are their troubles and worries? What interests them? All those questions can be answered with some specific search on the Internet, if you know what information “bubbles” to look at. However, there is another way. The paper is devoted to the discourse analysis of students’ talks on a free topic. The experiment was run within a phonetic discipline called “Voice coaching” (for 2-year students majoring in linguistics). The task was to write a text of 150-200 words maximum. There should be Introduction (the student introduces the topic; states the aim of the talk); Main body (the student picks up 1-2 ideas of the topic and dwells upon them: defend, contradict, contrast, condition, etc.); Conclusions (the student infers some takeaway message). One can also enclose a list of references (2-3 items). The course was delivered in 2021-2022 and 2020-2021 years, there were 76 students enrolled in this elective course all in all. Each student has to choose 6 topics of his own and prepare a talk (a text and an audio/oral presentation). Discourses amount to 456 texts of a very original nature. The report presents a discourse analysis of the students’ works according to the following parameters: 1) topic formulation and its revelation in the text; 2) concepts within the text; 3) lexical means to conceptualize the idea.