‘Why Choose Us? ’ Texts in University Websites: A Genre Analysis

The impact of globalisation has caused some huge transformations for higher education institutions. One is the need to publicise themselves much as businesses perform marketisation. Accordingly, a set of academic promotional genres has emerged to respond to these changes. This corpus-driven study attempts to analyse the ‘Why choose us? ’ section, embedded with a promotional purpose, in 40 university websites. The aim is to examine how the text is structured and what lexico-grammatical features are employed to realise its communicative functions. Both a textual and a keyword analysis were conducted. A six-move structure in a conventional ‘Why choose us? ’ text was identified. Both the overused and underused keywords generated from the corpus were shown to mirror the nature of the promotional language in the texts. In addition, the opinions of potential readers (through questionnaires) were examined to assess the possible impact of the marketing tools that universities use. Different viewers showed divergent reading focuses on the text. Implications and suggestions are provided