Date of Award

7-1-2020

Thesis Type

masters

Document Type

Thesis (Restricted Access)

Divisions

language

Department

Faculty of Languages and Linguistics

Institution

Universiti Malaya

Abstract

The present research is a genre analysis of hotel websites, targeting the main three aspects; the move structure, communicative purposes, and linguistic features on the 23 five-star and four-star hotel homepages in Iran. Bhatia’s (1993) model is used to investigate the communicative purposes of the digital genre, Suen (2013) framework which is a comprehensive model was adapted to examine the rhetorical move structure, and a combination of Bhatia’s (1993) and Cook’s (2001) model was used to analyze the common linguistic features. The findings of this research are going to contribute some knowledge to the production of more effective homepages specifically for the hotel industry, especially for Iranian hotels’ websites. The main purpose of the hotel homepage is to attract the readers' attention so that the customers are persuaded to buy the products and services. The persuasion is done indirectly by arranging the move structure wisely and the word and grammatical choices correctly to accomplish the hotels' communicative purposes. This present study can also be used as a guideline for teachers who teach Business English. This study can help students to improve their communicative abilities with regards to promotional and persuasive writing in the Business context. The present study does not deal with all the issues in this field, but it solely concentrates on the three parts which are to investigate the function and application of communicative purposes, the move structure, and the linguistic features of hotel homepages. Genre analysis of hotel homepages in Iran can be explored in other aspects of the genre analysis field and more extensively for further studies in the future.

Note

Dissertation (M.A.) – Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, 2020.

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