A Contrastive Genre Analysis On The English Version Of Chinese And American University Website Introductions

Genre Analysis Theory put forward by Swales and Bhatia offers a new perspective for analyzing macrostructures and communicative purposes of special fields and professional discourses.The university website introduction,as a specialized discourse,aims to publicize universities' popularity and improve reputation of universities.Therefore,university website introductions have their main communicative purposes and genre structures.EVCUIs(English version of Chinese university introductions)and AUIs(American university introductions)on websites share similar communicative purposes and belong to the same genre,but it still remains to be discovered what similarities and differences they have in genre structures.This paper intends to discover similarities and differences between this two kinds of introductions in terms of move structures.Qualitative analysis as well as quantitative analysis will be adopted in the research and research results show that all the moves,obligatory and optional moves occurring in both EVCUIs and AUIs are predominantly similar.Moreover,move sequences are not categorically linear;there are deviations of move reversion,repetition and cycle.Nevertheless,in a specific university introduction,the most common situation is that not all moves occur.Moves occurring in EVCUIs are more full-scale,and move sequences are more uniform while moves occurring in American university introductions are not particular about mentioning all the aspects and move sequences are more arbitrary.In view of analysis in this paper,several suggestions are put forward to improve the quality of the English version of EVCUIs on websites and make them meet international standards.For example,designers should organize the English version of the Chinese university introduction in English thinking pattern instead of simply translating the Chinese version.Some unnecessary moves can be removed and for moves whose contents are too long to introduce,it is better to briefly mention the key points in the introduction while the details can be hyperlinked.The author expects that this search will not only accelerate the reading,writing and teaching of this genre,then improve the quality of EVCUIs,but also provide some valuable suggestions to enhance competitive ability of Chinese universities in the world as well as develop international exchanges and communication.