International Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics (al2020)

47 / 2020-07-31 10:35:40

A Critical Genre Analysis of Campus Notices on University WeChat Official Accounts

Critical genre analysis, move analysis, interdiscursivity, WeChat official accounts

Forum on Frontier Issues in Applied Linguistics > discourse analysis

With the joint force of the colonization of promotional culture and the revolutionary development of We media technology, and the widespread usage of WeChat Official Account, one of the leading We Media platforms in China, has transformed university communication in terms of discursive and generic features. To understand the unique linguistic and generic features of the university WeChat post, this paper analyzes a corpus of the WeChat posts of notice type collected from Chinese University WeChat official accounts, based on Bhatia’s Critical Genre Analysis theory. The present study investigates the distinctive features of the WeChat posts in terms of move structure and rhetorical strategies with a special emphasis on the manifestation of interdiscursive phenomena. Analysis shows that there are 10 moves in total, serving 5 different communicative functions and multiple forms of interdiscursivity have also been discovered. The new features then are discussed in relation to the changes in professional practice and professional as well as social culture in today’s world.