A Contrastive Genre Analysis Of University Prospectus Between Chinese And American Universities

Amid the increasing trend of globalization, external exchanges have extended intothe whole society. What is more, education has also got on the track ofinternationalization. In the new historical period of education, international exchangebecomes the keystone of college work. Under these circumstances, China’s universitiesshould actively open up to the outside world and participate in more global activities.Apart from the leading discipline, leading faculty and management, Englishprospectuses of universities on their homepage play a major role in publicizinguniversities to the whole world. Therefore, it is significant to study the discourseconstruction of prospectuses of universities.This paper collects20samples respectively from Wu Shulian’s2012ranking list ofChinese universities and USnews2012ranking list of American universities to analyzeand compare the prospectuses of Chinese university and American university.The analysis is carried out according to the framework of Swales’(1990) definitionof genre and Bhatia’s (1993) move analysis. Hofstede’s cross-cultural theory (1991)individualism vs. collectivism, uncertainty avoidance and power distance are employedto explore the reasons for the similarities and differences.The analysis firstly identifies the move structure of Chinese universityprospectuses and American university prospectuses by qualitative analysis. Then, thesimilarities and differences between Chinese and American university prospectuses aresummarized from three aspects (frequency, sequence and length of move) withexamples by quantitative analysis and explained by Hofstede’s value dimensions. Theresults indicate that university prospectus has a pattern of generic structure and thegenre structures of the two sets of data are similar in the macro level by sharing thesame communicative purposes. Both of them include Establishing Background (in orderto give a general idea of the university’s brief history, ranking, area, etc.), IllustratingCapability (including excellent faculty, adequate sources of students, various sorts ofmajors for choosing, abundant academic and research resources for using, etc.),Presenting Achievements (including famous alumni cultivated by the university andawards won in different competitions), and so on. Secondly, the differences exist in therealization of peculiar moves and steps, which are caused by the different culturebackgrounds between China and America. The differences in the frequency of moves of Chinese university prospectus and American university prospectus is caused by thepeople’s attitude to collectivism and individualism in different cultural background; Thedifferences in the sequence of moves lies in that people in China and America takedifferent actions when facing uncertainty avoidance; and the differences in length ofmoves is caused by the different degrees of power distance in China and America.Finally, some suggestions of writing university prospectus are proposed. Theauthor hopes that this thesis will facilitate the reading, writing and teaching of this genreand make Chinese universities improve competitive ability in the world.