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A Contrastive Genre Analysis of Chinese and American University Presidents’ Welcome Messages on the Websites

Author: WangMing
Tutor: DongYuanXing
School: China University of Geosciences
Course: Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics
Keywords: university presidents’ welcome messages contrastive study moves steps
CLC: H152
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 68
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Abstract

University president’s welcome message (hereafter referred to as UPWM) on the website is the words published on the university website written by the president of the university. In the message, the writer introduces the basic information about the university, including the history of the university, the scale of the faculty and enrollment, the capability of the university, campus culture and so on. University president’s welcome message on the website, like the window of a university, is an important medium for the outside world to know the university and its president. Though this kind of genre has great importance, researches on the genre of university presidents’ welcome messages on the websites are relatively too few compared with other genre studies.Based on the genre analysis theory, this thesis compares the move structures and linguistic features between CUPWMs (Chinese university presidents’ welcome messages) and AUPWMs (American university presidents’ welcome messages) with 15 CUPWMs and 15 AUPWMs. It explores the reasons for the similarities and differences from social and cultural factors. At last, it gives some suggestions for writing English edition of Chinese university president’s welcome message.Enlighten by genre analysis model of Swales school and Bhatia’s seven-step approach, the author has worked out a theoretical framework for this thesis: communicative purposes help shape the move structure and the linguistic features of a text. Meanwhile, the purpose of communication, the move structure and the linguistic features are all influenced by social factors and cultural backgrounds. Guided by the framework, this thesis compares the move structures and the linguistic features of the CUPWMs and the AUPWMs by both qualitative methods and quantitative methods. The major findings are as follows:Firstly, both the CUPWMs and the AUPWMs are of the same genre, for their communicative purposes are all the same, which are to give a brief introduction to the universities, to promote their capability and to persuade the potential talented students to recruit so as to enlarge their influences. Secondly, the move structures of the CUPWMs and the AUPWMs share moves of background, capability description and campus culture.Apart from the similarities, some differences between the CUPWMs and the AUPWMs are discovered and contrasted. Firstly, in move 1-Beginning, the CUPWMs have one more step-Lead-in than the AUPUMs. Secondly, in move 2-Background, the CUPWMs always state the long history of a university in detail, while the sentences in the AUPWMs are always short and concise. Thirdly, in move 3-Capability Description, Step 2-Showing Honors of the CUPWMs, usually lists various kinds of awards or honors granted by authorized organizations or institutions, while in the AUPWMs, Step 2-Distinctive Features always states the distinctive features of a university. Fourthly, in move 4-Campus Culture, we can find that the goal of a university appears frequently in the CUPWMs while there is no such tendency in the AUPWMs. Furthermore, in the CUPWMs political vocabulary is very common while it doesn’t appear in the AUPWMs. Fifthly, in move 5-Issuing Invitation, American university presidents leave their contact information for further contact, while it seldom appears in the CUPWMs. Sixthly, the CUPWMs usually use the proper name of university to refer to the university while the AUPWMs always use first person such as "we, our, us" as the reference of a university. Lastly, the AUPWMs usually attach a link with a few key words to facilitate reading, while the CUPWMs seldom adopt this skill of hyperlink.The similarities between the CUPWMs and the AUPWMs in the move structure and linguistic features are mainly attributed to culture universalism, the tendency of globalization in education. The differences can be explained by social and cultural differences, such as the differences in culture dimensions of high-context vs. low-context, high power distance vs. low power distance, individualism vs. collectivism, long-term orientation vs. short-term orientation.Finally, this thesis draws some suggestions on how to write English edition of Chinese university president’s welcome message on its English website.

A Contrastive Genre Analysis of Chinese and American University Presidents’ Welcome Messages on the Websites

Abstract

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