A Corpus-based Study Of Department Introductions Inenglish Chinese, American And British Universities From The Perspective Genre

Amid the increasing trend of globalization, external exchanges have extended into the whole society. What is more, education has also got on the track of internationalization. In the new historical period of education, international exchange becomes the keystone of college work. Under these circumstances, China's universities should actively open up to the outside world and participate in more global activities. Apart from the leading discipline, leading faculty and management, English introductions to departments of universities on their homepage play a major role in publicizing universities to the whole world. As the primary means of external communication, English introductions to departments directly affect the image and orientation of universities. Therefore, it is significant to study the linguistic features and discourse construction of English introductions to departments of universities.Since the early 1980s, discourse analysis has developed from description to explanation. It goes beyond the surface-level description of language to interpret the deep-level rationale of discourse structure. As a main branch of discourse analysis, genre analysis has aroused the great scholarly interest at home and abroad. Genre and genre analysis have become a hot issue in the field of linguistic research. In the past twenty years, a lot of genre analysts have been devoted to the study of research article (RA) in academic writing and made the rich achievements. However, heretofore there have been little genre-based researches focusing on the English introductions to departments of universities.This paper attempts to conduct a comparative corpus-based study on the English introductions to departments of universities in China and that in English-speaking countries, especially in America and in Britain. It aims to find out the specific genre features of department introductions. Collecting the introductions to department on university homepage, six corpora were built. 120 English introductions of departments across 6 disciplines (3 Arts and 3 Science) from Chinese and English-speaking countries'university homepage were obtained. The schematic moves and lexical chunks of these introductions were identified and compared according to cultures and disciplines.Using a synthesis of two authoritative models of genre analysis, namely, Swale's move model and Bhatia's model, this study concludes that some degree of variation exists despite a certain degree of homogeneity between the Chinese department introductions and that of English-speaking countries. Culture is one parameter that results in the difference in English department introductions while the disciplinary variation affects little. Cultural variation does make a difference to the holistic features of introductions, such as type-token ratio, mean sentence numbers, total volumes. As for the move structure, there is a striking difference in move length, move frequency. However, as to the move sequence, a linear sequence is concluded in spite of a few cases of cycle, reversion and repetition. This study also demonstrates that cultural variation indeed affects the choice of lexical chunks in different moves. Inadequate awareness of genre knowledge and cultural variation is found in English department introductions of some Chinese universities. The divergences may be the result of the influence of language transfer.The findings of this study are instructive to the Chinese universities in the writing of English introductions to departments.