The genre of WEBSITES

Hello everybody!

This week we're dealing with the genre of websites: a mass communication medium that nowadays is omnipresent.

There are different types of websites. Each type has its specific features, its language and its intended audience.

We can identify two main categories of websites:
1.Personal websites: anyone can publish their own site for different reasons.
2 Institutional websites: they are put up by organisations, universities..to guide the public on the work they do and the services they offer.

However, it is a difficult task to identify the linguistic peculiarities of websites because there is a great number of personal websites on the Net(think about the variety of blogs for example) and there are no specific rules to follow..

For my analysis I've chosen these two sites:

A dictionary of slang is aimed at discovering English slang and colloquialisms used in the United Kingdom. For this reason I think the intended audience are advanced learners but also native speakers who want to know some specific and unusual expressions of their mothertongue.

The layout of the site is very simple and it's easy to orientate yourself; significantly the word SLANG it is presented in a much bigger font size than the rest of the text and placed at the beginning of the page.
The language used is quite informal.We can notice this in the brief introduction: "A monster online dictionary", "please take the time to read this.."
Besides the use of present simple, we find also the imperative ("try", "take the time"). In a certain sense this underlines the fact that the language is not so formal..

Moreover, we can point out the large presence of noun phrases used as hyperlinks (Back, search, home, site banners, copyright, bibliography...); also each letter of the alphabet is an hyperlink: clicking on C, all the slang expressions beginning with C will be displayed...

BBC Learning English
Looking at the front page of this site we initially come across the BBC logo. It is on the top of the page and indicates immediately the source and the nature of the site.

I think that in this case the intended audience it's larger and less specific than the previous one.
In my opinion, everyone who is interested in news, business, sports, entertainment..and everyone who simply wants to improve his/her skills in English can be the target audience of BBC learning language. This means that the readers are not only English students or teachers, not only mothertongue speakers but all people in the world..obviously the reasons for their choice of the site are extremely diversified...

In the centre of the home page we can see a series of images which are an ulterior resource to make the site attractive.
The layout is more elaborate than the previous site. Here we can find also a site map which prevent readers from getting lost.

As regards language, it is quite concise, formal and not difficult to understand. Generally there is a prevalence of short noun phrases and single words (words in the news, grammar and vocabulary, quizzes, news English...)

Finally there is an high level of intertextuality. In fact, there are numerous hyperlinks to other BBC related sites and to other sites for teachers and learners.


In conclusion we can assert that, although these two websites are similar for some aspects- the same degree of syntactic compression and the large use of present verb forms for example- they differ for others. BBC English learning has a totally different layout: it has pictures, many more links and contents!

bye
Annalisa

Photo source:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/juampe/19121593/