A Research On The Marketization In University Enrollment Prospectuses-from The Perspective Of Genre Mixing

With the dramatic expansion and increasing globalization in higher education sector, universities at home and abroad have been competing more fiercely against one another in recent years. In the world of promotional culture and advertising, universities have to resort to various strategies to seek for development. This thesis aims to study the marketization strategies used in university enrollment prospectus (UEP) from a genre mixing perspective.Genre mixing is a new issue in genre studies responding to the ever-changing world. It refers to "the manipulation of generic conventions resulting in the mixing of generic values" (Bhatia, 1997: 189). By drawing upon Bhatia's model of generic variation, the present research sets out to look into the advertising genre mixing in university enrollment prospectus. A corpus which comprises thirty university enrollment prospectuses is set up for analysis. It is conducted at three interrelated levels, namely the genre, text and social practice levels to investigate how genre mixing is manifested in university enrollment prospectus. The thesis concludes that in the current increasingly competitive environment and overwhelmingly advertising activities, university enrollment prospectus genre has been mixed with advertising genre, resulting in the mixing of generic values between the two genres. This research is also meaningful to ESP teaching, particularly ESP writing.