Media studies and media discourse(s) in English: one term, many identities

This paper provides some insights into the terminology and related contents and methods in the studies pertaining to the Media, with special focus on English language-related research. To do so, in the first place, I touch on the shift from mono-modal to multimodal forms of communication; then I illustrate the state of the art in Media Studies, highlighting their increasingly wide-ranging scope; finally, I focus on Media Discourse and posit that it has widened its scope so much that it needs to be revisited as a plurality of fields, giving voice to a plurality of language varieties, each one with its own identity.