| With the development of Internet technology, online courses become very popular and promote the emergence and development of online education. Online education first appeared in the 1960’s in USA while China’s online education started until the mid 1990’s. Compared with traditional education, online education can not only provide more abundant learning recourses,but also overcome the barriers of time and geography, which enables the students to have the equal opportunities of enjoying educational recourses. Due to the fact that there are different kinds of online courses available, course descriptions become the basis on which students have a better understanding of the course and make a sound choice. It becomes crucial that what on earth the course description should contain to let the students have a full understanding of a course. As such, this paper studies the genre of online course descriptions in order to explore their specific generic structures and communicative purposes.The theoretical framework of the study is based on models of Swales ’(1990), Bhatia’s(1993) and Hasan’s together with Halliday’s interpersonal function of systemic functional grammar. This study mainly explores the following research questions:(1) What are the communication purposes of English online course descriptions?(2) What is the move structure of English online course descriptions?(3) What is the generic structure potential of English online course descriptions?(4) What are the specific language features of English online course descriptions?This study collected 60 online course descriptions from MOOCS. The quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted to carry out an in-depth analysis from three aspects:communicative purposes, generic structure and language features of online course descriptions.The results of this study are as follows: Firstly, the main communicative purposes of online course descriptions include three aspects: offering course information, attracting the readers’ attention and arousing the readers’ interests. Among them, the basic communicative purpose is to provide relevant information about course by introducing the course contents to the readers. The second is to present some advantages of learning the course to attract the readers’ attention and arouse their interests. All of these are to achieve the goal of persuading the potential learners to choose the course. Secondly, online course description has a pattern of generic structure. The generic structure consists of ten moves, namely, “Interest Arousing”, “Background Information”,“Course Introduction”, “Course Requirements”, “Course Design”, “Course Assessment”,“Desired Outcomes”, “Additional Information”, “Instructor of the Course” and “Frequently Asked Questions”. Not all the ten identified moves occur in one online course descriptionsimultaneously and the sequence of each move is different. Among them “course introduction” is the obligatory element, which accounts for 100% in the 60 discourses. Accordingly, a generic structure potential is derived: [(IA)∧(BI)]∧[CI∧(CR*)·(CD*)·(DO*)·(CA*)·(IC*)·(AI*)]∧(FAQ). Thirdly, the language features of online course descriptions are mainly embodied in mood and modality systems of interpersonal meaning. In terms of mood system, the study found out that declarative mood is mainly used to introduce the course. The declarative mood can explain the course contents objectively and accurately. In addition, course designers use interrogative and imperative mood to reduce the distance between the readers and the course providers. Concerning modality system, modal verbs “can”, “may” and “will” are used frequently, among which the use frequency of middle-value modal verb “will” is the highest, up to 60%. The use of “will” can make the statement less assertive and easier to be accepted by the readers.It is hoped that the results of this study may have some implications for teachers to develop their online course description effectively and professionally. Similarly, they may help potential learners select their online courses efficiently with supportive suggestions. |
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