Systemic Functional Linguistics; language metafunctions; multimodal discourse analysis

Drawing upon the author?s long-term research into the generic features of university internet presentations and the paper attempts to provide an insight into the ways universities employ multimodal elements to advertise the academic experience, research-informed teaching and research results, attracting prospective students. The research is anchored in the methodology of genre analysis (Martin, Iedema, Bhatia, Swales) and multimodal discourse analysis related to Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (Lemke, O?Halloran, Kress, van Leuween) and based on the corpus of electronic material from two British, two North American and two Czech university websites. The corpus design does not only provide material for a case study of this web genre but also enables a cross-cultural comparison to be made.