Multimodal Discourse Analysis of English Portals of Chinese and American Universities: A Case Study of Introductory Web Pages

Abstract

This article makes a multimodal discourse analysis case study of the forty introductory web pages of Chinese and American universities in the aspects of genre theory, visual grammar and system of image-text relations. Through the analysis, some problems existed in the introductory web pages of Chinese universities are found out and some proposals to address the problems are also provided. The article aims at helping readers understand the social meanings and functions of language and image on the introductory web pages of English portals of universities.