الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
 |  | from | 173 |  |  |
| | | from | 173 | | |
Abstract
The present study aims at comparing and finding how the state and the non-state university
homepages in Egypt utilise the digital genre features to communicate their social and
professional purposes. In addition, it aims at discovering the extent to which the academic
genre in Egypt is colonised by promotional genre. This study adopts an eclectic approach. It
analyses the textual and the socio-cognitive perspectives that are proposed by Bhatia (2004) to
investigate the homepage genre rhetorical moves, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity. In
addition, the study integrates the digital genre approach proposed by Askehave and Nielsen
(2004) in Bhatia’s (2004) framework of analysis to analyse moves and hyperlinks. Moreover,
to probe the visual elements, the social semiotic approach proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen
(2006) is employed. First, the textual analysis indicates that both sectors share the same number
of moves and acknowledged communicative purposes. However, they do not share the
communicative purposes of the sub-moves, which are governed by the social and professional
practices of each sector. Both sectors homepages are found to be hybridised, but more
intertextual generic links and integrated promotional genres are found on the non-state
university homepages. Second, the socio-cognitive analysis reveals that the promotional genre
has a great influence on the way both sectors web content writers construct their homepages,
which assures that the social and political changes that took place in Egypt in the last nine years
have a great impact on the spread of the promotional genre on the state and the non-state
university homepages. Finally, the social semiotic analysis reveals that both sectors use a
variety of semiotic modes, whereas the images and semiotics that are displayed on the nonstate
university homepages are more student oriented, which highlight their promotional
intentions