UK university websites: A multimodal, corpus-based analysis

Academic discourse has been a much-explored field of research, especially scientific academic discourse. Recently, research interest has also focused on institutional academic discourse; in particular, CDA research has pointed out how university discourse has undergone a process of marketization. In changing their communicative style, universities tend to borrow commercial models and words from the business domain and use persuasive techniques. In addition, significant theoretical investigation on the interaction between visuals and language has demonstrated that technological developments have led to the fact that visuals are becoming increasingly central in communicative events. Against this framework the present paper aims at exploring how students, one of the main addressees of web-mediated university communication, are depicted in both visual and written components of the websites. To this purpose, a corpus of web pages of UK universities has been assembled. The corpus-based analysis of the AcWaC-Eu corpus, a 40-million word corpus, has been integrated by a multimodal analysis of a subcorpus of English university websites. The analyses have highlighted the existing trend of representing students as ‘consumers’ to whom a full array of services and possibilities is offered.