A Contrastive Investigation Of The Move Structure And Promotional Strategies In English Introductions Of Chinese And American Universities

In the context of globalization,promoting the image of a university and recruiting potential students have become critical and urgent for higher educational institutions to remain internationally competitive.Some higher education genres,such as university prospectuses and brochures,have become promotional genres.They not only provide readers with basic information of the university,but also promote the university itself and attract more potential students to apply for the university.However,the majority of studies on the promotion of higher education discourse have focused on higher education genres in western countries,while only a few of them have been conducted on Chinese counterparts.Even fewer studies have contrastively investigated the promotion in western and Chinese higher education genres.What’s more,as a new promotional genre of higher educational institution,the university introduction on universities’ websites is under-researched and marginalized.The present study chooses 50 Chinese university introductions written in English(CUI)and 50 American university introductions(AUI)as the research data.They are collected from official websites of Chinese and American universities.Based on Swales(1990,2004)and Bhatia’s(1993,2004)definitions of genre and move,this research attempts to carry out a contrastive genre analysis of CUI and AUI,employing move analysis and detailed textual analysis.It aims to unfold moves and promotional strategies adopted in both CUI and AUI which facilitate to promote the universities,and make a further comparison between them.Through move analysis,move structures of CUI and AUI are identified respectively.As a result,CUI contains nine moves and AUI contains ten moves.Among them,seven mutual recurrent moves are shared in CUI and AUI,namely,“Positioning the university”,“Stating spirit of the university”,“Reviewing the establishment history”,“Introducing the location”,“Illustrating capability”,“Presenting achievements” and “Addressing the mission and future aspirations”.The other three distinctive moves are: “Demonstrating international exchanges and cooperation” in CUI,“Opening remarks” and “Giving further information” in AUI.Then,an elaborate comparison between CUI and AUI has been carried out to find how they are different in move structure,which is divided into two sub-comparisons between seven mutual recurrent moves and three distinctive moves in terms of frequency,length and content.In addition,via a detailed textual analysis into the linguistic features of each move,four kinds of promotional strategies are employed to enhance the promotional process of university introduction: “positive evaluation”,“authoritative strategy”,“conversational strategy” and “literary strategy”.Among them,“positive evaluation” is extensively utilized in both CUI and AUI.CUI tends to employ “authoritative strategy” while AUI tends to employ “conversational strategy”and “literary strategy”.Through contrastive investigation of move structures and promotional strategies in CUI and AUI,this study reveals the similarities and differences between promotion of Chinese and American universities.On one hand,moves not only inform readers of necessary information,but also be identified to be promotional.To achieve the same purpose of promotion,both of CUI and AUI are inclined to highlight their advantages such as self-position,history,geological location,capabilities and achievements by frequently adopting four related moves.And they both utilize “positive evaluation” to enhance the promotional process.On the other hand,they bear different promotional concerns.CUI seems to pay more attention to the establishment history and universities’ aspiration to become world-class.While AUI focuses on guiding readers to know more about the university.Apart from this,they both employ distinct promotional strategies.CUI utilizes the“authoritative strategy” to emphasize the great attention from the authority and arouse readers’ respect.AUI mainly adopts “conversational strategy” and “literary strategy”,aiming to attract readers’ attentions,get close to readers,bridge the distance between students and universities,as well as to build a friendly public image.Meanwhile,the choice of the move structures and promotional strategies in CUI and AUI also indicates different identity construction of Chinese and American universities.Chinese universities seem to adopt a university-centered position which stands in stark contrast to the student-centered position of American universities.