الفهرس | Only 14 pages are availabe for public view |
Abstract The present study aims at comparing and finding how the state and the non-state university homepages in Egypt utilise the digital genre features to communicate their social and professional purposes. In addition, it aims at discovering the extent to which the academic genre in Egypt is colonised by promotional genre. This study adopts an eclectic approach. It analyses the textual and the socio-cognitive perspectives that are proposed by Bhatia (2004) to investigate the homepage genre rhetorical moves, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity. In addition, the study integrates the digital genre approach proposed by Askehave and Nielsen (2004) in Bhatia’s (2004) framework of analysis to analyse moves and hyperlinks. Moreover, to probe the visual elements, the social semiotic approach proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) is employed. First, the textual analysis indicates that both sectors share the same number of moves and acknowledged communicative purposes. However, they do not share the communicative purposes of the sub-moves, which are governed by the social and professional practices of each sector. Both sectors homepages are found to be hybridised, but more intertextual generic links and integrated promotional genres are found on the non-state university homepages. Second, the socio-cognitive analysis reveals that the promotional genre has a great influence on the way both sectors web content writers construct their homepages, which assures that the social and political changes that took place in Egypt in the last nine years have a great impact on the spread of the promotional genre on the state and the non-state university homepages. Finally, the social semiotic analysis reveals that both sectors use a variety of semiotic modes, whereas the images and semiotics that are displayed on the nonstate university homepages are more student oriented, which highlight their promotional intentions |