A Genre-based Contrastive Study Of Prospectuses From Chinese And English-speaking Countries’ University Websites

As a contrastive genre analysis of the university prospectuses on their websites,the present research aims to summarize the similarities and difference between theChinese prospectuses of the universities in China and the prospectuses of theircounterparts in English-speaking countries. Based on Swales’ CARS method andBhatia’s seven-step method, the research has identified the macro-structure of theuniversity prospectuses in the two languages and their lexical and grammaticalfeatures. A contrast has also been done and it indicates that the two kinds of textsbasically share the same macrostructure except for two moves──introducing thehistory and mentioning the achievements in globalization, which are only found inChinese university prospectuses as necessary moves. The contrastive analysis of thelexical and grammatical features shows that the sentences in Chinese prospectusestend to be longer and more complex than those in English prospectuses and the formercontain a considerable number of political and educational terminologies while thelatter don’t.The discoveries of the research are expected to be helpful to the creation ofEnglish prospectuses of Chinese Universities, which is of great importance as theuniversities play a significant role in the global promotion of Chinese language.Suggestions are also given on the creation of the above-mentioned texts. The otherapplication of those discoveries is in TCFL classes as the scheme of themicrostructure and lexical-grammatical features of the genre is helpful for students toimprove the reading comprehension and the writing abilities of these texts.