A Genre Analysis Of The International Student Prospectuses Of Chinese And British Universities

With the dramatic expansion and increasing globalization of higher education,universities at home and abord have been competing more fiercely against oneanother. Universities have to resort to various strategies to seek for furtherdevelopment. A well-written prospectus plays an important role in the process.Based on Swales’ theory of genre, Askehave’s move analysis and Halliday’sSystemic Functional Grammar, the present study makes a comparative analysis ofthe international student prospectuses of Chinese and British universities, aiming tofind out the similarities and differences between them in terms of move structuresand linguistic and multimodal features. Then the author explores the underlyingreasons for the similarities and differences. The present study adopts both qualitativeand quantitative analysis.15international student prospectuses are selected from thelist of TOP100China University Ranking in2012and15from TOP100BritainUniversity Ranking in2012,30in total.Through the comparative analysis of the samples, the following conclusionscan be drawn. Firstly, the prospectuses of both Chinese and British universitiesfollow a consistent genre type, and the communicative purpose is to establish a gooduniversity image to attract the interest of potential students. Secondly, although theobligatory and optional moves of Chinese and British prospectuses are not exactlythe same, they share six moves, namely Identification of Sender, Description ofUniversity, Description of Course, Providing Application Details, Providing PracticalInformation, and Providing Contact Information. Thirdly, British universities alwayspresent their university history, innovations, and social responsibility, whereas theChinese universities focus on faculty team, their honors and connections with thegovernment. Fourthly, a large number of highly evaluative adjectives, personalpronouns, photos and various sentence patterns are employed in British prospectusesto set up a favorable image to potential students, thus paving a way to fulfill theircommunicative purposes.