Interdiscursivity and Promotional Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Genre Analysis of About Us Texts on Chinese University Websites
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Tao Xiong
Tao Xiong is a professor of discourse studies and research fellow at the CLAL, GDUFS. He has published in refereed Journals, such as
Discourse and Society ,Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education ,International Journal of Language ,Identity and Education , among others.
and
Qiuna Li
Qiuna Li is a graduate student in the School of English Education at GDUFS. Her research interest lies in discourse studies in educational contexts.
Abstract
The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts. While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements, little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites. The goal of the present study is twofold: first, to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China; and second, to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader socio-political context. Findings have indicated five main moves: giving an overview, stressing historical status, displaying strengths, pledging political and ideological allegiance, and communicating goals and visions. Move 3, displaying strengths, has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities, faculty team, talent cultivation, disciplinary fields construction, academic research, and international exchange. The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.
About the authors
Tao Xiong is a professor of discourse studies and research fellow at the CLAL, GDUFS. He has published in refereed Journals, such as Discourse and Society, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, International Journal of Language, Identity and Education, among others.
Qiuna Li is a graduate student in the School of English Education at GDUFS. Her research interest lies in discourse studies in educational contexts.
Acknowledgments
This study is supported by the Chinese Ministry of Education (MOE) Humanities and Social Science Research Funding (20YJA740050) and the MOE Key Research Project of Humanities and Social Science (16JJD740006) conducted by the Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics (CLAL), Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS). We would like to thank the reviewers for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this manuscript.
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© 2020 FLTRP, Walter de Gruyter, Cultural and Education Section British Embassy
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Studies of Public Discourse in the Chinese Sociocultural Context Guest Editors: Jianping Chen & Tao Xiong
- Studies of Public Discourse in the Chinese Sociocultural Context: An Introduction (Continued)
- Interdiscursivity and Promotional Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Genre Analysis of About Us Texts on Chinese University Websites
- Discourse Marker Na (那) as an Interpersonal-Level Compensatory Strategy in Clinical Interviews
- The Metaphoric and Metonymic Use of Country Names in Economic News：A Corpus-Based Analysis
- Second Language Acquisition
- Vocabulary Alignment in the Continuation Task of Translation
- Incidental L2 Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading: Concerns, Progresses and Future Directions
- Academic Writing
- Frequency Effect of Formulaic Sequences on CAF in Academic Writing: Examples from L2 Master’s Theses
- Identity Construction in Academic Writing of Student Writers Who Use English as an Additional Language: A Literature Review1
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Studies of Public Discourse in the Chinese Sociocultural Context Guest Editors: Jianping Chen & Tao Xiong
- Studies of Public Discourse in the Chinese Sociocultural Context: An Introduction (Continued)
- Interdiscursivity and Promotional Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Genre Analysis of About Us Texts on Chinese University Websites
- Discourse Marker Na (那) as an Interpersonal-Level Compensatory Strategy in Clinical Interviews
- The Metaphoric and Metonymic Use of Country Names in Economic News：A Corpus-Based Analysis
- Second Language Acquisition
- Vocabulary Alignment in the Continuation Task of Translation
- Incidental L2 Vocabulary Acquisition and Reading: Concerns, Progresses and Future Directions
- Academic Writing
- Frequency Effect of Formulaic Sequences on CAF in Academic Writing: Examples from L2 Master’s Theses
- Identity Construction in Academic Writing of Student Writers Who Use English as an Additional Language: A Literature Review1
- Abstracts
- Chinese Abstracts
