A Critical Genre Analysis Of University WeChat Posters

We are living in an era of new media explosion thanks to the rapid development of information and communication technology.We Chat Official Account,one of the leading social media platforms in China,has permeated every corner and every sector of the contemporary society.University campus is no exception.In response to the wild popularity of We Chat in China,universities have been making active use of their We Chat official accounts as one of the major channels for brand promoting,campus culture building and service providing.This brings profound impacts on and changes to the discursive practices,professional practice as well as professional culture in the universities.The present study carries out a systematic critical genre analysis on one of the newly emerging type of university discourse that is essentially We Chat-mediated,i.e.,the We Chat poster on university We Chat official accounts.A series of analyses are conducted on a self-built corpus of 100 university We Chat posters,using One Note as the main text-processing tool.Following Bhatia’s critical genre analysis framework,the study consists of three analyses conducted in three dimensions covering four levels of discourse realizations,namely a corpus-based move analysis in the dimension of text &genre,an analysis of interdiscursive features concerning the dimension of professional practice and an analysis of professional culture regarding influences from broad socio-cultural context.The findings of the study show that the genre of university We Chat poster,which typically consists of 10 move types,serves both informational and promotional communicative purposes which are achieved by a combination of six communicative functions.These communicative functions are in turn accomplished through various interdiscursively complex rhetorical and discursive strategies.Furthermore,the distinctive features of this particular genre are prominent essentially due to the overwhelming influence and impact from new media technology,promotional culture and three discursive tendencies in today’s socio-culture context.