A Genre Analysis Of Chinese, American And British University Profiles

Genre analysis has been well documented and become popular in discoursestudies in recent years. It has been proved to be an effective tool to identify the overallstructure and language organization of various kinds of discourse. It has been used toanalyze various discourses such as academic discourse, promotional discourse and soon, but it has not touched upon the discourse of university profiles which are regardedas a “window” for a university to introduce and promote itself to the outsiders.Therefore, this thesis aims at exploring the schematic structure of university profilesto reveal how this kind of discourse is organized to reach its social purpose. The maintarget readers of English version of Chines university profiles (EVCUPs) areforeigners whose thinking patterns may be different from ours. Therefore, in order tomake the EVCUPs more readable for foreigners, the overall purpose of this thesis isto explore the schematic structure of university profiles of universities in America andBritain and EVCUPs.The framework of analysis of this study relies on the genre theory of the SydneySchool. With the qualitative methodology, the register and communicative purpose ofuniversity profiles will be initially analyzed in order to predict the genre type ofuniversity profiles. Then it comes to the specific analysis of the data’s schematicstructure, attempting to illustrate a regular schematic structure of university profiles.In addition to the structure analysis, language features will be studied to providerationale for the classification of stages and phases. Finally the contrastive study ofEVCUPs and Foreign University Profiles (FUPs) will be conducted with the purposeof providing insightful suggestions for the improvement of EVCUPs.The data used in this study involve32university profiles which are collectedfrom the official websites of top16universities in China, top8universities in USAand top8universities in UK. All of them are the latest version as shown in theappendixes.It is found that both EVCUPs and FUPs share similar communicative purposes.Aiming to inform readers and promote themselves, all the university profiles fall intothe genre of reports. Their schematic structures are as follows respectively:In EVCUPs, the schematic structure generally follows the sequence of stages ofClassification^Description (“^” means “is followed by”) with Description as theobligatory stage and Classification as the optional stage. Phases consistingDescription include Background Information (BI), Capability Illustration (CI),University Culture (UC), Management, Socialization, International Collaboration (IC)and Goal, among which only Background Information and Capability Illustration areobligatory phases and the rest are optional ones. The sequence of phases is like this:BI^CI^Goal with the other phases inserted in them, either before CI or after CI.FUPs, on the whole, share similar schematic structure with EVCUPs asClassification^Description. As the obligatory stage, Description is constituted byseveral phases which are BI, CI, Management, Finance, Internationalization,University Culture, Goal and Visiting Information (VI), within which merely CI is obligatory but BI, Management and Finance occupy large quantity of percentages. Noregular sequences of these phases can be perceived but they also begin with BI or CI.The comparison of EVCUPs and FUPs indicates what we should learn from FUPs.Firstly, EVCUPs should be simplified through the use of common words and simpleclauses in order to facilitate the quick skimming of readers. Secondly, aspectsneglected by Chinese writers like the introduction of finance, scholarship, tuition,visiting information should be added to the introduction of university. Thirdly,hyperlink is an effective way to simplify the webpage of university introduction aswell as to introduce the university in length.This thesis contributes to an explanation of the schematic structure of universityprofiles. In addition, practically, it benefits the writers of university profiles to haveguidelines to follow, presenting the universities to the world in a quite organized andclear way.