This study is part of a larger multidisciplinary project that aims at investigating communicative and organisational strategies used by non-English speaking universities in Europe, particularly focusing on the Italian university websites, in order to achieve internationalisation and a greater European integration. The project involves researchers active in different fields such as corpus linguistics, multimodality, economics and governance studies. The multidisciplinary approach is necessary because without an overview of the whole internationalisation process and the implementation of the Bologna process and of the Lisbon strategy, and an evaluation of the effect on Social Welfare of competition between universities it is not possible to assess the communicative practices enacted by European Universities through the English language institutional websites.Within the wider research project, the linguistic analysis focuses on the way European universities communicate using the English version of their institutional websites to a wider international audience, prospective students, researchers and stakeholders, as a result of the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA).Because of the widespread use of web-based communication, of the consequences of the Bologna Declaration, and of an increasing students’ mobility, in recent years universities have faced the need to implement new ways to disseminate knowledge. Consequently, knowledge production and dissemination (research and teaching) can no longer be carried out in a relative institutional isolation. Universities have to accommodate the information provided via web to a new international audience and, therefore, to take into account the difficulties students and more generally an international addressee encounter to understand complex academic discourses.Recent corpus linguistics studies have taken into consideration spoken and written English within the academic environment, focusing on traditionally neglected areas such as interactions in study groups, dialogues with administrative staff, web-based course guides and prospectuses. Biber (2006), shed light on a range of features that are specific to the various academic registers, including the institutional ones. These studies have highlighted that the correct fruition of these texts is indeed an essential requirement for the success of disciplinary academic communication.Against this framework, the present paper analyses the AcWaC-EU (Academic Web as Corpus in Europe) corpus containing web pages in English of UK/Irish universities and European universities (Bernardini & Ferraresi 2013). We aim to identify specific lexico-grammatical features of the non-native varieties compared to those of the native texts to try to assess their communicative effectiveness. Paragraph 2 gives an overview of the wider context of the Bologna Process, its developments, and the outcomes of its provisions. Paragraph 3 reviews some previous works on the academic discourse, and introduces the corpus under investigation. Paragraph 4 presents key word analysis as an analytic tool, and discusses the comparison between the native and non-native English varieties, while paragraph 5 concludes by summing up the main issues dealt with in the previous sections and suggests further research plans.
Institutional Academic Discourse in European University websites. Internationalisation and Marketization in the European Higher Education Area
VENUTI, MARCO
2016-01-01
Abstract
This study is part of a larger multidisciplinary project that aims at investigating communicative and organisational strategies used by non-English speaking universities in Europe, particularly focusing on the Italian university websites, in order to achieve internationalisation and a greater European integration. The project involves researchers active in different fields such as corpus linguistics, multimodality, economics and governance studies. The multidisciplinary approach is necessary because without an overview of the whole internationalisation process and the implementation of the Bologna process and of the Lisbon strategy, and an evaluation of the effect on Social Welfare of competition between universities it is not possible to assess the communicative practices enacted by European Universities through the English language institutional websites.Within the wider research project, the linguistic analysis focuses on the way European universities communicate using the English version of their institutional websites to a wider international audience, prospective students, researchers and stakeholders, as a result of the creation of a European Higher Education Area (EHEA).Because of the widespread use of web-based communication, of the consequences of the Bologna Declaration, and of an increasing students’ mobility, in recent years universities have faced the need to implement new ways to disseminate knowledge. Consequently, knowledge production and dissemination (research and teaching) can no longer be carried out in a relative institutional isolation. Universities have to accommodate the information provided via web to a new international audience and, therefore, to take into account the difficulties students and more generally an international addressee encounter to understand complex academic discourses.Recent corpus linguistics studies have taken into consideration spoken and written English within the academic environment, focusing on traditionally neglected areas such as interactions in study groups, dialogues with administrative staff, web-based course guides and prospectuses. Biber (2006), shed light on a range of features that are specific to the various academic registers, including the institutional ones. These studies have highlighted that the correct fruition of these texts is indeed an essential requirement for the success of disciplinary academic communication.Against this framework, the present paper analyses the AcWaC-EU (Academic Web as Corpus in Europe) corpus containing web pages in English of UK/Irish universities and European universities (Bernardini & Ferraresi 2013). We aim to identify specific lexico-grammatical features of the non-native varieties compared to those of the native texts to try to assess their communicative effectiveness. Paragraph 2 gives an overview of the wider context of the Bologna Process, its developments, and the outcomes of its provisions. Paragraph 3 reviews some previous works on the academic discourse, and introduces the corpus under investigation. Paragraph 4 presents key word analysis as an analytic tool, and discusses the comparison between the native and non-native English varieties, while paragraph 5 concludes by summing up the main issues dealt with in the previous sections and suggests further research plans.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
