Storytelling in lecture discourse

Storytelling is the term used nowadays by marketers, journalists, psychologists, lecturers, and is understood as a communicative strategy aimed at making narration interesting and memorable for the audience. The purpose of the research is to examine the specifics of the storytelling phenomenon in Russian lecture discourse and to summarize its typical characteristics. The research corpus is comprised of three lectures in linguistics delivered by Russian linguists (total length of 210 minutes). These lectures were studied by means of content analysis, discourse analysis as well as observation, systematization and classification. The study of the three lectures demonstrated the use of storytelling by all the lecturers. The lecturers construct their stories using emotional-evaluative linguistic means together with factual data, action verbs, and means of dialogicity such as elements of direct speech, inclusive pronoun we, rhetorical questions and exclamations. As a result of the theoretical and empirical analysis, the conclusion is made about the expedience of the storytelling use in educational context and in lecture discourse in particular.