Multimodal Discourse Analysis On The Representation Of Social Actors On Homepages Of Tsinghua University And Stanford University

With the popularity of the Internet nowadays, the homepage of a university website is recognized as an important way to establishing a university’s identity, publicizing its mission, and attracting potential students in the competitive marketization of tertiary education. However, limited research exists on investigating this new institutional discourse. As an attempt to enrich the field, the present study adopts van Leeuwen’s frameworks(2008) for analyzing visual and verbal representation of social actors and carries out a multimodal discourse analysis on the homepages of two prestigious universities in the United States and in China respectively. The purpose of the study is to investigate how Stanford University(SU) homepages and Tsinghua University(THU) homepages deploy two semiotic resources to represent principal institutional participants, and to uncover the differences between them in this regard.The present study utilizes both qualitative and quantitative analysis, with the former one being the main method. Through two months of screen-capturing, 37 different SU homepages and 38 different THU homepages were collected. Then, salient items on each university homepages were clustered according to their functions; the visual and verbal items which involve representation of related social actors were selected for multimodal analysis. The results revealed significant differences between two universities’ homepages.SU homepages use photographic images, frequently depicting students of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds as involved in various activities. Most of the pictures were taken with a detached view through medium shot, oblique angle and indirect address, which gives the viewer an impression of objectiveness and truthfulness. As for the verbal part, SU homepages show a high number of news headlines about the latest research achievements to foreground Stanford faculty’s leading roles in academics. All of these can be interpreted as marketing strategies to promote the university as a student-centered and research-oriented institution.On the contrary, THU homepages prefer to employ various types of images which are colorful, attractive but with low modality to represent students and a broad range of faculty. The frequent use of semiotic choices such as close shot, frontal angle and direct address greatly shortens the distance between the depicted people and the viewer, creating a sense of involvement and affinity. Nevertheless, linguistically a large coverage of news reports about the university and its governance invoke the impersonal and formal characteristics of administrative announcement. This paradoxical combination of representations in visual and verbal modes indicates an intertextual mix of promotional discourse and bureaucratic discourse.The current study verifies the applicability and feasibility of van Leeuwen’s(2008) frameworks, especially in Chinese context. More importantly, it bridges the micro-level multimodal phenomena of institutional discourse and the macro-level social contexts, which contributes to the development of Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis.