Multimodal representation of international students on Australian university websites
A School of Education Seminar presented on 31 July, 2019 by Dr Zuocheng Zhang
In this presentation, I will look at how Australian universities represent international students by using language and images on their university websites. The websites of three distinct public universities, including one prestigious metropolitan university, one highly-regarded university in the nation’s capital, and one in the regional and rural area, were selected as examples. The analysis shows that international students were portrayed on the university websites in different ways: international students woven into the university structure and becoming invisible, international students as a visible and distinct group on campus, and international students awkwardly patched onto the university fabric. International students were assigned agentive or less agentive roles in perceived academic and campus life. There were different dyads of interaction constructed between universities and their international students. The co-deployment of language and images on the university websites also demonstrated each university’s tendency to adopt a hard-sell or soft-sell approach to marketing itself to prospective international students. I will argue that the university websites as multimodal texts reflect the “colour-blind” and “colourful” approaches to the Other and understandings of international student education in transition.
