Company profiles are increasingly used to construct the corporate brand of Fortune Global 500 Chinese Manufacturing Companies (FG500CMCs). However, the communication of the corporate brand through the company profile is not sufficiently explored. This article explored the discursive strategies that were exploited to construct the desired brand identities of the FG500CMCs. Through the approach of critical genre analysis, it is found that the branding of the FG500CMCs is realized by the strategic organization of rhetorical moves, the purposeful employment of rhetorical devices, and tactical wording. All the obligatory moves identified primarily highlight a set of attributes indicating the strengths, competitiveness, and superiority of the FG500CMCs. This projects the distinctiveness of the brand identities of the companies. The strengths, competitiveness, and superiority are constructed by deploying graduation resources, appropriating numerical resources, adopting high-end and high-tech-related terms, and exploiting endorsement, authentication, and altruism. Besides analyzing the lexico-grammatical features and discursive techniques, this article also investigates how the FG500CMCs’ particular attributes and strengths are covertly conveyed through the strategic organization and distribution of the moves. This provides a more comprehensive explication and thus gives new insights into the body of knowledge on the discursive construction of corporate branding. With grounded elaboration on the tactful use of language and covert arrangement of the moves, this article also sheds light on the content design of the ‘company profile’ for shaping stakeholders’ and the public’s perception of the corporate brand.

Short-video social media is becoming a major advertising tool in the digital age. Covert advertising is increasingly used as a major strategy to effectively promote a product. This study aims to explore the genre of covert short-video advertisements launched in Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok. It integrates Bhatia’s critical genre analysis approach with Kress and van Leeuwen’s Multimodal Discourse Analysis approach as the conceptual framework. The researchers selected 100 covert short-video advertisements in Douyin for analysis. The findings demonstrate how this genre is manipulated to exploit consumerism, to shape consumer culture and to drive business growth through rhetorical moves, interdiscursivity and exploitation of multimodal resources. This study not only gives insight into the less explored deceptive new media genre but also contributes to recognition of covert short-video advertising and methods in analyzing genres in the age of “new media.”

The study investigates the pre-clinical medical students' perceptions about their English language difficulties and lack at King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi medical students study an English language course at the pre-university level (Foundation Year) to train and prepare for their future extensive medical study in medical college. The English language program comprises reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills and targets enhancing students' language skills. The study aims: (a) to examine the pre-clinical medical students' level of difficulties related to their listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. (b) To determine the pre-medical students' language lacks and the students' general proficiency. A mixed-method approach, including quantitative and qualitative research methods was used. Data from questionnaires of 67 pre-clinical medical students has been used with representative interviews from the faculty members teaching pre-clinical subjects in the medical college. The findings revealed that the students experience significant difficulties in the use of English language skills, and the skill-wise average is worth considering such as writing (27.95%), reading (25.36%), speaking (24.86%), and listening (12.73%). The findings indicated that writing skills were the most difficult among all the language skills for pre-clinical medical students. Finally, the recommendations were made to revise the English language course, improve the teaching methodology, and address the students' insufficient English language proficiency.