A Systemic Functional Linguistic Approach to University Course Guides

This article discusses the way the course guide construes content through language. it is one among many genres the university produces as it competes for student intake that provides student revenue. yet, the course guide is crucial as it explains the university's faculties and programmes to students. it presents the university's portrayal of its central service to students, namely education. this shapes students' perception and decision about their future studies. hence, the course guide is vital for the university's marketing endeavours. to understand the way the course guide uses language, this article studies 8 course guides from 5 faculties with a sum of 35 undergraduate programmes from ucsi university, malaysia. analysis was qualitatively conducted using systemic functional linguistics, focusing on process type and participants for transitivity (ideational metafunction) and topical theme for theme (textual metafunction). for transitivity, the course guide prefers to portray the faculty, programme and students as participants using material and mental processes. for theme, the course guide prefers to emphasize the faculty, programme, students and field as topics using topical theme. hence, the course guide construes its discourse through both producer and consumers of tertiary education. this presents a view of ucsi university as striving to serve its students. it shows that the university is dynamic in providing education so that students are prepared for employment. this article also recommends some changes for the course guide to make it more convincing for readers