A Multi-perspective Genre Analysis Of University Introduction On Universities’ Websites

While it has developed rapidly during the past ten or twenty years, the higher education in China has also faced numerous challenges. The increasingly severe competition in attracting students among universities has brought some new developments, such as marketization, in higher education. Under such social background, the present study aims at investigating the marketization in higher education through a discussion of the university webpage introduction (thereafter UWI) in light of the theory of genre analysis. The thesis intends to probe into three questions:(1) What is the generic structure of UWI?(2) What are the lexical features of UWI?(3) Is there a genre mixing in UWI? If there is, how is it reflected?Bhatia’s multi-perspective model is employed as the basic framework for analyzing, and the data are examined from three interrelated levels, specifically, the levels of genre, text and social practice. Detailed analysis of move structure and generic structure is included.The result reveals that genre mixing does exist in UWI. Analysis at the level of genre shows that the move structure of UWI consists of eight moves and the UWI shares some moves with the promotional genres, thus indicates a kind of genre mixing with promotional genres. At the level of text, a genre mixing is also clearly manifested after the generalization of lexical chunks indicating each move. In the first place, an advertising tendency reveals itself in two aspects, firstly the layout and design, and secondly the lexical features. In the second place, celebrity effect is identified, featuring in the strategy of naming alumni or mentioning political leaders. In the third place, using massive figures, which is a typical skill in technological discourse, turns out to be an overwhelming tendency in all the30texts examined in the present study. At the level of social practice, analysis of social factors finds that the marketization of education and the advertising trend are two main factors influencing promotional genre mixing in UWI.The present study makes a contribution to the practice of genre analysis in the context of higher education. Moreover, it helps raise people’s critical awareness in UWI reading as well as other similar readings and cultivates people’s ability of thinking critically and independently.