A Genre-based Multimodal Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And American University Homepages On Websites

Along with the increasing international exchanges and cooperation between universities in China and in many other countries around the world, the English homepage on the website has been playing a prominent role in promoting the university. As a digital genre, it carries the characteristics of both the traditional genre and the network media, which adds complexity and difficulty to its analysis. Literature review shows that few genre-based studies have been done on the English homepages of universities, and even less in the comparative analysis of these genre texts between different cultures.With a corpus consisting of homepages of30Chinese universities and30American universities, the present study aims to conduct a comparative study of this genre on the websites of Chinese and American universities. A two-dimensional genre model developed from Swales’s traditional CARS model is used. The homepage is analyzed in two modes, the reading mode and the navigating mode, in which the moves are identified according to the communicative purposes and the hyperlinks are decided with an investigation into the semantic relations between the two texts connected by the link respectively. A comparative study between Chinese and American university homepages is carried out with different move structures and hyperlinks, as well as some discussions on the semiotic resources---colors, images, and page layouts---of these homepages.The findings of this study indicate that, in the reading mode, Chinese and American university homepages share some similar recurrent moves in addition to the differences in the components and the realization of each move. They also exhibit several distinctive moves as well as unique moves. In the navigating mode, the numbers and types of generic links are quite similar but the frequencies differ, while the numbers, types and realizations of the specific links are all different.In comparison to the American universities, the Chinese universities seem to lack various information categories, judging from the relatively monotonous contents and the traditional hierarchical navigation styles. Nevertheless, some Chinese universities still show that they are improving themselves to follow the international convention in the web design.Some socio-cultural interpretations are given in account for the differences. The results of the study serve as a practical guidance to Chinese universities in how to establish an English website in a more effective way, together with the aim to contribute to the outreach and exchanges of Chinese universities.