Course descriptions: communicative practices of an institutional genre

This paper examines, from a qualitative perspective, the content and wording of 60 academic course descriptions (ACDs), representative of six disciplines. The ACDs provide information about: the content of courses (97%), their goals/outcomes (50%), their logistics (73%), their methods (63%) and/or their disciplinary backgrounds (27%). Courses and their content are mentioned more often than their participants (i.e. students, teachers) and the participants’ activities (e.g. studying, teaching, learning). The course is often represented as an agent (68%); the course content mainly as a patient (88%); students as experiencers (38%), agents (25%) and recipients (25%), teachers (either alone or with students) as agents (about 15%), and their study activity as a patient (27%) or experiencer (17%). The content of the ACDs is encoded with the certainty of scheduled arrangements (see the frequent use of the simple present tense and will future, and the virtual absence of epistemic modality), and represented as non-negotiable events predetermined by external sources (i.e. courses, represented as volitional entities in charge of course design). This lends credibility and authoritativeness to the text authors, while avoiding the direct imposition of rules (deontic modality is virtually absent, and teachers and students are hardly ever represented as direct interlocutors). The findings suggest that the institutional genre of ACDs qualifies as hybrid, since it serves both an orientational and a regulatory function.