A walk through the multimodal landscape of university websites

Title: A walk through the multimodal landscape of university websites
Source document: Brno studies in English. 2015, vol. 41, iss. 1, pp. [77]-100
Extent
[77]-100
  • ISSN
    0524-6881 (print)
    1805-0867 (online)
Type: Article
Language
License: Not specified license
 

Notice: These citations are automatically created and might not follow citation rules properly.

Abstract(s)
The study provides an insight into the ways in which universities employ multimodal elements to advertise the academic experience, research-informed teaching and research results, thus attracting prospective students. Anchored in the methodology of genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis related to Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics, the research focuses on the contribution of images – photographs and pictures – to the ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings conveyed by the websites to prospective students. The corpus analysed includes the home pages and prospective students' web pages of British, North American and Czech university websites. The corpus design not only provides material for a case study of this web genre, but also enables a cross-cultural comparison to be made. The contrastive analysis revealed significant differences both in the form and the function of images between the British/American and the Czech sub-corpora suggesting the relevance of the social and cultural contexts for the realization and the establishment of genres. The development of web genres also seems to be significantly shaped by the progress of internet technologies and their growing affordances.
Note
The study is supported by the research project CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0222, "Posílení rozvoje Centra výzkumu odborného jazyka angličtiny a němčiny na FF OU" [Centre for the Research of Professional Language], funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic.
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