Italian and UK university websites: comparing communicative strategies

The Bologna Declaration, with its focus on a common European Higher Education Area (EHEA), hasencouraged trends to teach courses exclusively in English, promoted students and staff mobility andasked universities to change and implement reforms at a local, national and European level. In order tocomply with this international regulatory framework, European universities have had to change the waythey communicate and disseminate information, especially through the web by using English as a LinguaFranca (Mauranen 2010).The present paper explores the acWaC-EU corpus, a collection of Irish, British and Maltese universitywebsites and other European university websites in English (Bernardini and Ferraresi 2013).A previous study (Venuti and Nasti 2013) conducted on the corpus has proved that native Englishuniversities use a more descriptive, promotional language with a focus on students’ needs while otherEuropean universities seem to be more interested in university matters and in the internationalizationprocess without considering students’ concerns. Within this framework, this article confines its analysisto the comparison of Italian and UK university websites in order to investigate how UK universitiesemploy movement metaphors on their institutional websites, and to what extent Italian universities usethe conceptual frame of movement with a self-promotional purpose as English and Irish universities seemto do. On the basis of the analysis we try to assess to what extent Italian universities use English only tocomply with the international rules or whether they are actually interested in entering the European highereducation system, addressing and attracting a greater number of students. This paper also exploreswhether Italian universities are competing at a global level or are just providing a mere web-mediatedversion of their curricula and activities