multimodality; web genre; blog; university websites; polyphony; heteroglossia

The paper attracts attention to institutional websites, particularly the websites of selected British, North American and Czech universities, and their generic status and characteristics. Drawing upon a multi-faceted analysis of the corpus anchored in Hallidayan Systemic Functional approach, the related, recently developed fields of genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, and the Bakhtin?s concept of polyphony in the text, the study focuses on the complexity of the generic structure of the websites, which gives rise to their heteroglossic nature. Students? blogs are presented as a sub-genre of the super-genre of the university websites engaging an array of socially-differentiated voices into primarily monoglossic institutional discourse.

The paper attracts attention to institutional websites, particularly the websites of selected British, North American and Czech universities, and their generic status and characteristics. Drawing upon a multi-faceted analysis of the corpus anchored in Hallidayan Systemic Functional approach, the related, recently developed fields of genre analysis and multimodal discourse analysis, and the Bakhtin?s concept of polyphony in the text, the study focuses on the complexity of the generic structure of the websites, which gives rise to their heteroglossic nature. Students? blogs are presented as a sub-genre of the super-genre of the university websites engaging an array of socially-differentiated voices into primarily monoglossic institutional discourse.