| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄應用科技大學 === 應用外語系暨英語專業溝通與教學科技碩士班 === 104 === The ‘About Us’ page on the website of a higher education institution belongs to promotional genres (Bhatia, 2004). Promotional genres tend to promote products for potential audiences. The purpose of this study aims to identify the rhetorical structure of ‘About Us’ pages in Colleges of Engineering and Colleges of Arts and Humanities Websites in Asian and North American universities. Additionally, this study adopts the stance and engagement analysis (Hyland, 2005) to investigate the author’s stance and how the author engages with the readers in the ‘About Us’ text.
The study collected 114 ‘About Us’ pages from the websites of the Colleges of Engineering and the Colleges of Arts and Humanities in Asian and North American universities using the QS World University Rankings by Faculty 2013 – Engineering and Technology, and Arts and Humanities. The finding indicated that six rhetorical moves were identified in the present study. The major finding of rhetorical structures is that the ‘About Us’ page across both cultures and disciplines tended to use Move 1 Self-promotion opening, Move 2 Mission statement, Move 3 Status quo of college, and Move 4 Feature presentation to express the universities’ voices in their ‘About Us’ pages on their websites.
With regard to stance and engagement features (Hyland, 2005), the finding of discipline variation displays that the ‘About Us’ pages in the College of Arts & Humanities used more attitude markers than the College of Engineering. Cultural variation showed that North American universities tended to express themselves more in the ‘About Us’ pages by using self-mentions, reader pronouns and directives features to interact with readers. Asian universities tended to use more attitude markers to show their background in order to attract students in their ‘About Us’ pages.
The rhetorical structures and the stance and engagement features in the ‘About Us’ pages display the writers’ writing strategies, their engagement with readers, and their stance throughout the text to achieve their goal of recruiting students.
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