Verbal and visual self-promotion : comparing the 'About Us' webpages of top- and second-tier universities in China and America

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Type
Thesis
Author
Xie, Chaoqun
Supervisor
Teo, Peter
Abstract
Self-promotion is a ubiquitous institutional practice of universities worldwide. It serves a variety of high-priority institutional purposes such as vying for a pre-eminent position in university league tables, recruiting students and academics, attracting governmental and private funds, and seeking out university-business cooperation opportunities. Central to self-promotion is the role that discourse plays. Previous studies on promotional discourses in higher education have conducted textual and image analyses and deployed corpus techniques to uncover universities’ promotional strategies. However, few have examined how universities appraise themselves from a cross-cultural and crosstier perspective. Theoretically framed within Systemic Functional Linguistics and Fairclough’s Dialectical Relational Approach, this study focuses on the construal of evaluative meaning in institutional discourse for promotional purposes. It adopts Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal Theory to examine the use of evaluation in the About Us webpages of 160 top- and second-tier universities in China and America. Evaluative resources that express and modulate the force and focus of attitude in the About Us texts and images are identified. Cross-country and cross-tier comparisons are conducted by determining the frequencies of the evaluative resources, and performing a close analysis of the functions and features of the resources in the two semiotic modes. Quantitative and qualitative findings reveal marked cross-country and cross-tier differences in the ways that different types of universities project and position themselves to their respective stakeholders. While the top-tier Chinese universities seem to construct the most authoritative institutional image and most dominant university-reader relationship, the second-tier American universities tend to project the most approachable image and establish the most intimate relationship. In contrast, the top-tier American and secondtier Chinese universities adopt relatively moderate strategies in forging institutional image and building relationship with their stakeholders. These findings are discussed against the backdrop of particular ethnolinguistic, socio-cultural, socio-political, and socio-economic factors that constitute the ecologies of higher education. Unveiling dominant promotional strategies adopted by different types of universities from a multimodal evaluation perspective, this study calls for more attention to the core mission of higher education in universities’ promotional practices.
Date Issued
2020
Call Number
P93 Xie
Date Submitted
2020