"What’s in a headline?" Learning and Teaching the Use of Rhetorical Strategies to Students of Economics and Business through The Economist

Newspaper and magazine headlines have been the subject of abundant research over the years and, because of their peculiar characteristics, they can be considered as a genre. One of their main functions is to catch the attention of the reader and, to achieve this goal, headline writers make use of different rhetorical strategies. The Economist is a newspaper which is well-known for its witty headlines. Some of the strategies used to engage the reader in a “dialogic language game” (Bowker 2008: 167) are linguistic devices, such as puns, metaphors, and phonological schemes (i.e. alliteration, assonance and rhyme), whereas others are based on cognitive mechanisms, such as allusions to idioms, quotations, titles of novels, films, and songs. Drawing on a study conducted by R.J. Alexander in 1986, this article will first present the results of the analysis of a dataset of 118 headlines of articles published in The Economist dealing specifically with two of the major events that have recently hit the world, namely the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The goal of this investigation is to establish whether the rhetorical strategies observed over thirty-five years ago by Alexander are still found in contemporary headlines, especially in the case of such serious and sensitive global issues. Then, the article discusses the results of a closed-ended questionnaire on the rhetorical strategies used by The Economist in its headlines taken by a cohort of 100 EFL/ESP learners, Italian undergraduate students specializing either in Economics or Business. The goal of this analysis is to assess the above-mentioned students’ reading comprehension skills in English and, more specifically, their ability to identify and understand what lies “beyond the information given” (Alexander 1986: 176).