Genre analysis of hybrid texts: Language used in online course introduction of international universities

This study thus aimed to examine a spoken discourse genre of new hybrid texts in the online course previews extracted from an online learning website. The corpora consisted of 12,735 words compiled through 30 pieces of the top five online course previews within the three sub-categories including Business, Academics, and How-to of Coursera websites. The results showed that there were marked features of the discourse as hybrid text which displayed the combination of promotional and academic properties. The unique rhetorical organization in terms of employing the obligatory move structures: detailing the course, establishing credentials, and indicating the benefit of learners was extensively found. Besides this, the grammatical feature of if- conditional forms and the lexical bundle “be going to”, were discovered to purposively support the rhetorical organization to create the persuasive effect on the target audience to enroll the full courses. Implications of the present study in relation to the genre analysis of the new hybrid text were also discussed.