Agenre-based Contrastive Study Of President's Welcome Messages On Chinese Andamerican Universities' Websites

The present study aims to conduct a contrastive genre analysis of the genre President's Welcome found on the websites of Chinese and American universities, using the genre analysis theories developed by scholars like John Swales and Bhatia. Two corpora were built, one consisting of 30 messages of Chinese universities (CU) and the other comprising 30 messages of American universities (AU). Adopting Bhatia's seven-step method of analyzing unfamiliar genres, the rhetorical move structure of the messages in the two corpora was identified respectively, accompanied by a detailed textual analysis of each move. After that, a comparison of the two identified move structures was carried out in terms of the frequency, sequence, length and content of the moves. The major findings are as follows:Both CU and AU President's Welcome messages share the same major communicative purpose of promoting the university.The move analysis shows that both CU and AU President's Welcome messages consist of ten recurrent moves, sharing seven mutual recurrent moves while owning three distinctive moves to them and they share the same communicative purpose of promoting the image of the university. In addition to the mutual recurrent moves and distinctive moves, a number of mutual peripheral moves and unique moves were also identified and examined. A close study on the seven mutual moves reveals that one obligatory step determines each move but CU messages have more optional steps than AU messages.The textual analysis also proves to be fruitful as it is found that an abundant use of positive adjectives is the most frequent strategy used to promote the university. In the meantime, other linguistic features such as key words in the identification of moves and steps, and the personal pronouns were also investigated to provide a better picture of the genre.The comparison demonstrates that CU Presidents are less uniform and conventional in their organization of the messages and they also exhibit remarkable differences from AU Presidents in the content as well as linguistic realization of the moves. The differences were then summarized followed by a further attempt to account for the differences from the social and cultural aspects underlying the genre.The results of this study can serve as a practical guidance to Chinese universities in the writing of President's Welcome with an aim to facilitate the cross-cultural academic exchanges between Chinese and American universities.