A walk through the multimodal landscape of university websites

Abstract

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.

Genre Analysis of Saudi Universities’ Websites: Analysis of Rhetorical Moves and Discursive Strategies for Marketization Purposes

“…Regarding universities' websites and webpages, different studies have examined different aspects of language, usage, and application in various settings for the purpose of understanding this genre in comparison with other academic disciplines. Tomarkova (2015), for example, explored the websites of some Czech, British, and American universities to compare and contrast their multimodal features. He found that cultural and social contexts affect the universities' representation.…”

A Qualitative Discourse Analysis of Ontario University Websites: Exploring the Value Systems of Teacher Education Webpages

“…Universities use their websites to project their values and beliefs about elements of their overall institutional structures, which include their social, pedagogical and curricular structures. Previous research has shown that university website designs are informed by an array of strategies to represent a carefully curated institutional identity, and the information displayed on website webpages often reveals messages that align with the institutional value systems, and by extension, a hidden curriculum (Killick, 2016;Lažetić, 2019;Tomášková, 2015;Wymer & Thiele, 2016;Zhang & O'Halloran, 2012).…”

“…All accredited Teacher Education programs must demonstrate an enhanced focus on themes of special education and diversity in their developments of TE programs, which include but are not limited to the course selections, the practicums, and the values underpinning their pedagogical principles. However, universities have the discretion to place more or less emphasis on different features of inclusivity in education -which they often do (Crocker & Dibbon, 2008) -to complement their university's value systems and brand profile (Lažetić, 2019;Tomášková, 2015;Zhang & O'Halloran, 2013). The representation and implementation of initiatives aimed at promoting inclusivity in education by Education faculties in universities are particularly important to in making the hidden curriculum detectable as teachers play a major role in mediating its negative impact on learners' prospects for success (Apple, 2011;Pantić & Florian, 2015).…”

“…Institutions of higher education have been shown to transmit features of value systems that contribute to the reproduction of social inequality through the curriculum, and institutional mediums such as university websites (Apple, 2011;Cotton et al, 2013;Killick, 2016;Lažetić, 2019;Savage et al, 2013;Tomášková, 2015). The cultural, political and/or social values transmitted are informed by educational beliefs and percolate through the curriculum and teaching practices.…”

“…In order to explore the ways in which the value systems of the universities interact with the value systems embedded in curricular mandates to reveal a hidden curriculum, the webpages of three education faculties were selected for analysis. Although previous studies have shown that investigating universities' website designs is useful for highlighting those institutional cultures, values and functions (Crocker & Dibbon, 2008;Djonov, 2007;Holden & Kitchen, 2016;Lažetić, 2019;McAllister, 2010;Tomášková, 2015;Wymer & Rundle-Thiele, 2017;Zhang & O'Halloran, 2013), they do not consider the ways in which curricular mandates displayed on these websites are also strategically used and adapted to reproduce and maintain covert institutional values and by extension, a hidden curriculum. The goal of the present study was to address that research gap by identifying and assessing the value systems embedded in three higher education institutions in Ontario based on each institutions' Teacher Education webpages.…”