| As one of the most widely used discourse genres, advertising discourse has been attracting increasing attention nowadays. And being an emerging advertising genre, English education advertisement has become a significant intermedium with distinctive generic features. Especially today, under the circumstance of economic globalization and with education industry becoming a flourishing internationalized industry, education advertisement has become more important and essential. As a direct primary communication channel between schools or training institutes and potential learners, education advertisement plays an active role in publicizing and promoting outstanding educational resources or services to customers. Besides, acting as the effective means of external communication, the quality of English education advertisement may directly influence the institution's image and the orientation of its education philosophy. Therefore, exploring its language features and seeking the generic layouts and regularities of the discourse pattern hold important guiding and practical significance. Thus, based on the genre analysis theory, this study intends to carry out a systematic and thorough research into the move structure, generic structure potential (GSP), lexical choice and textual patterns of English education advertising discourse. The study aims at exploring its distinguished discourse features and linguistic style, so as to offer certain help for a better perception and composition of such genre.Since 1960s, along with the emergence and development of functionalism school and discourse analysis, genre and genre analysis have aroused linguists'attention from various perspectives. Under the guidance of genre analysis, considerable discussions and researches have been conducted with the aim of revealing different discourse constructing models, cognitive models and various language styles. (Hasan, 1985; Ventola, 1987; Swales, 1990, 2004; Bhatia, 1993, 2004; Qin Xiubai, 1997; Ding Jianxin, 2007). Based on the previous research findings and theoretical framework, this study intends to carry out the research and exploration into English education advertisements from two levels. On the level of generic structure, Swales' CARS model (1990), Bhatia's generic structure of advertisements (2004) and Hasan's GSP model (1985) are employed as the theoretical support to explore the move structure and generic structure potential of education advertisements. On the level of lexical choice and textual pattern, with the assistance of the corporal software AntConc's Concordance and Wordlist options, and based on the quantitative analysis, the features of lexical choice are analyzed, in order that the language features of such genre with particular communicative purpose can be revealed. Furthermore, the present study also aims to explore the characteristic features of textual pattern of education advertisements.To ensure the reliability and validity, and to guarantee its broad representation and objectivity, 40 pieces of English education advertisements of language training schools are chosen form the Internet as the sample texts for this study. Quantitative analysis and discussions are conducted, especially, a detailed analysis is given to No.19 sample texts.Through analysis and discussion, many findings have been generated from the present study. Discourses within education advertising generic domain enjoy the similar generic structure and language feature, which all serve for the distinctive promoting communicative purpose. For the move structure and generic structure potential, education advertisement has 9 moves, including 5 obligatories and 4 optionals. All the 9 moves appear orderly in the discourse, especially the 5 obligatories. The findings proved that such features help readers to get the rational identification and comprehension of education advertising genre. For lexical choice, positive evaluate adjectives and interactive self-references are frequently used in such genre, as well as the verb in the tense of present simple and simple future, which are in the objective state. For textual pattern, upon the general features of copywriting, the problem-solution and case instruction models are widely adopted in education advertisements with distinctive generic features; and in the meantime, appropriate parallel display of both pictures and texts are recognized as the striking characteristics of this genre. It is sincerely expected that the findings of this study can be efficiently and effectively applied to the teaching of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and business English writing. Because with the application of genre analysis theory and methodology, classroom activities can be organized and monitored aiming at identifying generic structures of different genres, so that students can learn to understand and perceive the constructing strategies of various types of discourse genres so as to learn to appreciate their different features and styles, and accordingly be able to compose them in the desired way.It is revealed that, English education advertisement, on the one hand, captures the general characteristic features of promotional genre, and on the other hand, it reveals its certain generic structures as well as the choice of language. Through the analysis and discussion upon the sample texts, this study explores the process of composing English education advertising discourses and reveals the cognitive or mental state of both the copywriters and potential customers. Meanwhile, a modified model is put forward with the hope of benefiting ESP teaching and advertising discourse writing. Thus, the exploration proves the theory to be practical and rational.It is evident that the present study has in a sense deepened and enriched the understanding and practice of genre analysis. Besides, with the assistance of corpus-based approach, a brand new perspective of genre analysis is unfolded, furthermore, innovative guidance and suggestions are put forward for ESP and business writing teaching.
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