The Appraisal Analysis Of English Education Advertisements

English education advertisements are an essential product of the prosperous education development in economic society. It shortens the distance between advertised schools and readers/potential customers. Within short lines, advertisements contain a great deal of information, which enables target students to know about the teaching resources and advantages of the schools completely.In this thesis, English education advertisements, as the data, are investigated from the perspective of Appraisal Theory with the aim of exploring the distribution of appraisal resources in these texts and discovering the interpersonal relationship between the advertised school and readers/potential customers. Furthermore, the thorough analysis can promote complete comprehension of these advertisements, help Chinese readers to understand these texts better and have reference value for the writing of Chinese education advertisements.Appraisal Theory was put forward in 1990s as the supplement to interpersonal meanings of Systemic Functional Linguistics. After its birth, many scholars modified it continuously and applied it to analyze a wide variety of real texts, such as advertisements, journal language, speeches, etc, in order to discover how it expresses the standpoints and attitudes of the speakers/writers.The research is conducted on 22 English education advertisements collected from the internet. Through the discussion, two findings are summarized as follows: for one thing, there exist abundant appraisal resources in these texts. Advertisers employ a wide variety of appraisal resources to convince potential students to attend the advertised schools. Appraisal system has three sub-systems: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Advertisers make full use of attitude resources to show their feelings, high teaching qualities and all beneficial elements, engagement resources to prove the accuracy of their statements and graduation resources to make the school more charming and impressive. For another thing,â‘ Attitude resources are mainly positive and active in order to appraise all services provided by the advertised schools; they are also attractive and influential, which can evoke readers/ potential customers'resonance and affection easily. The affect resources are not very rich, and most of which are descriptions of the teachers and students'feelings; the appreciation resources express positive evaluation to each detail of teaching; the judgment recourses concern about the professional capacity of the teaching staff.â‘¡Through the research on engagement meanings, it is found that most of the advertisement content is written in monoglossic approach and the distribution of engagement resources is unbalanced: disclaim and entertain resources are much more than proclaim and attribute ones.â‘¢The discussion about graduation meanings shows that the advertisements contain plenty of force resources for the sake of the strength and intensification of evaluative resources, but a few focus resources, especially no soften focus ones.This thesis is divided into five chapters systematically:Chapter One introduces the definition and significance of English education advertisements, then the qualitative and quantitative methods and the way of collecting the data. Next, the purpose and importance of the present study is presented here. This part ends with the structural organization.The second chapter is literature review. It reviews the most vital application of Appraisal Theory in different texts. Then it reviews the researches on English education advertisements. Through the introduction, the significance of this research is further proved.Chapter Three is about the framework of Appraisal Theory. Appraisal Theory has three branches, and each branch has its own subsystems. This part discusses the whole system in details.In Chapter Four, Appraisal Theory is used to analyze the advertisements carefully from each sub-system aspect in order to solve the research questions:â‘ what is the distribution of each appraisal resource?â‘¡how is the interpersonal relationship between the advertisers and readers/potential customers realized?. This chapter is the core of the thesis.The last chapter presents the major findings from the research, the limitations that stand in the way of this study and some suggestions for further researches.