Designing a Model for Evaluating Iranian University Websites: Using Fuzzy VIKOR Approach

Sustainable development of any country to some extent depends on successful accomplishment of construction projects, particularly infrastructures. Contractors have a key role in the success of these projects. Hence, the selection of a competent contractor as a complicated and hard decision process has a vital importance in the destiny of any construction project. Contractor selection is in essence a multicriteria decision-making that ought to encompass so many aspects of the project and the client’s requirements on one hand and the capabilities and past records of the contractors on the other hand. Failure in selecting a competent contractor may cause time and cost overruns; quality shortcomings; increasing in claims, disputes and change orders; and even failure of the project. In spite of deficiencies of selecting a contractor by the rule of “the lowest bid price”, it still prevails in many countries including Iran. In this paper, a new contractor selection model based on the best-worst method (BWM) and well-known Fuzzy-VIKOR techniques is proposed as a solution to overcome the deficiencies of the traditional “lowest bid price” rule. An illustrative example of a water channel construction project verified the applicability of the proposed model in practice.

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Interdiscursivity and Promotional Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Genre Analysis of About Us Texts on Chinese University Websites

Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics ◽

10.1515/cjal-2020-0027 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 43 (4) ◽

pp. 397-416

Author(s):

Tao Xiong ◽

Qiuna Li

Keyword(s):

Higher Education ◽

Academic Research ◽

Public Institutions ◽

International Exchange ◽

Rhetorical Strategies ◽

University Websites ◽

Amount Of Information ◽

Chinese University ◽

The University ◽

Promotional Discourse

Abstract The debate on the marketization of discourse in higher education has sparked and sustained interest among researchers in discourse and education studies across a diversity of contexts. While most research in this line has focused on marketized discourses such as advertisements, little attention has been paid to promotional discourse in public institutions such as the About us texts on Chinese university websites. The goal of the present study is twofold: first, to describe the generic features of the university About us texts in China; and second, to analyze how promotional discourse is interdiscursively incorporated in the discourse by referring to the broader socio-political context. Findings have indicated five main moves: giving an overview, stressing historical status, displaying strengths, pledging political and ideological allegiance, and communicating goals and visions. Move 3, displaying strengths, has the greatest amount of information and can be further divided into six sub-moves which presents information on campus facilities, faculty team, talent cultivation, disciplinary fields construction, academic research, and international exchange. The main linguistic and rhetorical strategies used in these moves are analyzed and discussed.

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