This study attempted to examine and expand the applicability of Functional Theory of Political Campaign Discourse to individual interviews carried out separately with each candidate. To this end, interviews conducted separately with two candidates for 2017 British Parliamentary Election, namely Theresa May, the Conservative Party nominee and Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party nominee, were content analyzed using this framework. The findings showed that the most frequent message function applied by both candidates was ‘defense’, followed by ‘acclaim’ and ‘attack’. Both candidates discussed ‘policy’ topic far more frequently than ‘character’. These differences were proved to be statistically significant. Comparing the two candidates, the frequency results showed that Theresa May (i.e. the incumbent) employed less ‘acclaims’ but more ‘attacks’ and ‘defenses’ rather than Jeremy Corbyn (i.e. the challenger). These differences were not proved to be significant though. Theresa May emphasized ‘policy’ topic less and ‘character’ topic more than Jeremy Corbyn with a significant difference. In these personal interviews, as the candidates did not confront each other, the ‘attacks’ were fewer in number and less direct. This research confirms the value of categories suggested by the Functional Theory in the study of political discourse. Moreover, it demonstrates that the theory could be developed further to take into account more forms of political campaigns and other aspects of linguistic theory to include nonfunctional or overlapping function utterances as well. The pedagogical implications of this study for language learners, might be that they can get familiar with socio-cultural and socio-political contexts of the TL countries (UK). The teachers may use the transcripts and the results of this study in ESP courses such as journalism or media studies to boost learners’ pragmatic competence by adopting a discourse analysis perspective. And material designers will choose suitable t
