Highlighted actions, hidden actors : Linguistic text analysis on branding Finnish education for purposes of Transnational education
Haukilahti, Maria (2021-06-13)
Highlighted actions, hidden actors : Linguistic text analysis on branding Finnish education for purposes of Transnational education
Haukilahti, Maria
(13.06.2021)
Julkaisu on tekijänoikeussäännösten alainen. Teosta voi lukea ja tulostaa henkilökohtaista käyttöä varten. Käyttö kaupallisiin tarkoituksiin on kielletty.
avoin
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on:
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021061638013
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2021061638013
Tiivistelmä
Finnish education has received global fame after excelling in the OECD’s PISA studies in early 2000’s. Success brought growing number of educational visitors to Finland and led eventually to the establishment of a national strategy of a new export branch, transnational education. The strategy was first implemented by the Finnish universities but is now accompanied by small and medium size companies, assisted by Education Finland, a governmental cluster programme. This thesis studies how Finnish education is presented and how the linguistic choices are used to promote Finnish education in a leaflet published by the cluster programme.
When promoting a national education system to global markets, national values and public sub-sector branding will stand in the focus point. Like transnational education, public sector branding is also rather a new phenomenon in the Finnish context. This thesis aims to fill the research gap in the intersection of these theories by discussing the linguistic possibilities in promoting the education sector. Similar studies have not been made by yet, but for instance evaluative language use has been studied in connection of country and university brands, and in promotional discourse in general.
This study is a quantitative and qualitative text analysis in which corpus methods have been utilized. The data is analysed in two sections, first with the lenses of Appraisal theory and further with Transitivity theory. The analysis revealed that Finnish education is presented mainly through facts and positive evaluations, and that the actors and organisers of the education have been faded to the background to forefront the most distinguishing aspects of Finnish education. The linguistic elements used for the promotion are evaluative adjectives, adverbials, and nouns, that partially derive their positive meaning from the context. Highlighting the goals and processes occurs through passive structures. The results indicate that the way of promoting Finnish education still follows the already laid path of country branding. The public sub-sector branding in Finland relies heavily on national core values which is also visible in the linguistic choices made in the leaflet. This thesis sheds light on a path to study more of both transnational education and public sub-sector branding in Finland, also in connection to linguistic approaches.
When promoting a national education system to global markets, national values and public sub-sector branding will stand in the focus point. Like transnational education, public sector branding is also rather a new phenomenon in the Finnish context. This thesis aims to fill the research gap in the intersection of these theories by discussing the linguistic possibilities in promoting the education sector. Similar studies have not been made by yet, but for instance evaluative language use has been studied in connection of country and university brands, and in promotional discourse in general.
This study is a quantitative and qualitative text analysis in which corpus methods have been utilized. The data is analysed in two sections, first with the lenses of Appraisal theory and further with Transitivity theory. The analysis revealed that Finnish education is presented mainly through facts and positive evaluations, and that the actors and organisers of the education have been faded to the background to forefront the most distinguishing aspects of Finnish education. The linguistic elements used for the promotion are evaluative adjectives, adverbials, and nouns, that partially derive their positive meaning from the context. Highlighting the goals and processes occurs through passive structures. The results indicate that the way of promoting Finnish education still follows the already laid path of country branding. The public sub-sector branding in Finland relies heavily on national core values which is also visible in the linguistic choices made in the leaflet. This thesis sheds light on a path to study more of both transnational education and public sub-sector branding in Finland, also in connection to linguistic approaches.