As student and staff mobility is moving high on the European education political agenda, it becomes imperative for universities involved in the Bologna Process and the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) to adapt their academic programs to international needs and invest in successful communication strategies, providing international students and other interested parties with easy access to complete and transparent information (Vercruysse and Proteasa 2012). Producing web-based contents in English is one of the strategies adopted to communicate with the international community, since “the use of English as a lingua franca has become accepted as a fact of life in European higher education” (Mauranen 2010). This could affect the way in which university websites in English are conceived and structured from a genre perspective, regardless of the country of origin and the variety of English adopted – native English and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). To gain knowledge as to how European universities structure their web-based contents in English, we conducted a genre-driven study building on the theoretical approach developed by Swales (1990) and Biber et al. (2007), with the ultimate goal of integrating genre-related data into corpora and conducting a corpus-driven analysis of institutionalacademic texts. Corpus-based studies and genredriven discourse analyses are not easily reconcilable as the former are often associated with quantitative measures describing widespread patterns of language, whereas the latter are based on qualitative and detailed analyses of a small sample of texts (Biber et al. 2007). However, applying corpus linguistics’ techniques and methods to genre studies has significant benefits regarding the representativeness of the analyzed population. Furthermore, coding texts in a corpus with qualitative/interpretive data (e.g. communicative purposes) might provide new insights for a deeper understanding of linguistic differences/similarities across varieties of a language, e.g. native English and ELF. For the above purposes, we carried out a top-down categorization of a small sample of ELF and native English websites (taken as a case study), adapting Swales’ move analysis to web-based macro-genres. Move analysis, originally performed on single texts, i.e. research articles, has been conducted on the whole university website; the rationale behind this is that university websites could be associated to the concept of colony, made up of embedded component parts being themselves colonies (Hoey 2001). Similarly, university websites, taken as a whole, are a unique genre serving a set of communicative purposes, each of them realized, recursively, through single website portions, i.e. webpages and webpage sections, roughly corresponding to Swales’ moves and steps. The “about us” pages, for example, aim at presenting universities to their stakeholders through a number of strategies/steps, e.g. describing university history, giving information on governing bodies and administrative structures, providing contacts. Not only does description of university websites contribute to research on genre by providing a new and dynamic concept of web-based genre analysis, it crucially enhances corpus linguistics’ techniques by (manually) coding texts with genre-related metadata. After assigning genres to the webpages and using this information to construct subcorpora, the latter are analyzed to identify typical micro-features as well as similarities and differences between ELF and native English university (sub-)genres. This study is part of a wider Ph.D. project, which in the next future aims to combine top-down and bottom-up procedures for classifying university webpages. Building on results from the move analysis and top-down categorization, we will carry out experiments for automating the process by bootstrapping our manually coded corpus and using internal criteria to conduct a bottom-up automatic categorization along the lines of Forsyth and Sharoff (2014), eventually combining both perspectives.
Top-down categorization of university websites: A case study
DALAN, ERIKA
2015
Abstract
As student and staff mobility is moving high on the European education political agenda, it becomes imperative for universities involved in the Bologna Process and the EHEA (European Higher Education Area) to adapt their academic programs to international needs and invest in successful communication strategies, providing international students and other interested parties with easy access to complete and transparent information (Vercruysse and Proteasa 2012). Producing web-based contents in English is one of the strategies adopted to communicate with the international community, since “the use of English as a lingua franca has become accepted as a fact of life in European higher education” (Mauranen 2010). This could affect the way in which university websites in English are conceived and structured from a genre perspective, regardless of the country of origin and the variety of English adopted – native English and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca). To gain knowledge as to how European universities structure their web-based contents in English, we conducted a genre-driven study building on the theoretical approach developed by Swales (1990) and Biber et al. (2007), with the ultimate goal of integrating genre-related data into corpora and conducting a corpus-driven analysis of institutionalacademic texts. Corpus-based studies and genredriven discourse analyses are not easily reconcilable as the former are often associated with quantitative measures describing widespread patterns of language, whereas the latter are based on qualitative and detailed analyses of a small sample of texts (Biber et al. 2007). However, applying corpus linguistics’ techniques and methods to genre studies has significant benefits regarding the representativeness of the analyzed population. Furthermore, coding texts in a corpus with qualitative/interpretive data (e.g. communicative purposes) might provide new insights for a deeper understanding of linguistic differences/similarities across varieties of a language, e.g. native English and ELF. For the above purposes, we carried out a top-down categorization of a small sample of ELF and native English websites (taken as a case study), adapting Swales’ move analysis to web-based macro-genres. Move analysis, originally performed on single texts, i.e. research articles, has been conducted on the whole university website; the rationale behind this is that university websites could be associated to the concept of colony, made up of embedded component parts being themselves colonies (Hoey 2001). Similarly, university websites, taken as a whole, are a unique genre serving a set of communicative purposes, each of them realized, recursively, through single website portions, i.e. webpages and webpage sections, roughly corresponding to Swales’ moves and steps. The “about us” pages, for example, aim at presenting universities to their stakeholders through a number of strategies/steps, e.g. describing university history, giving information on governing bodies and administrative structures, providing contacts. Not only does description of university websites contribute to research on genre by providing a new and dynamic concept of web-based genre analysis, it crucially enhances corpus linguistics’ techniques by (manually) coding texts with genre-related metadata. After assigning genres to the webpages and using this information to construct subcorpora, the latter are analyzed to identify typical micro-features as well as similarities and differences between ELF and native English university (sub-)genres. This study is part of a wider Ph.D. project, which in the next future aims to combine top-down and bottom-up procedures for classifying university webpages. Building on results from the move analysis and top-down categorization, we will carry out experiments for automating the process by bootstrapping our manually coded corpus and using internal criteria to conduct a bottom-up automatic categorization along the lines of Forsyth and Sharoff (2014), eventually combining both perspectives.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
