Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism

Websites of private hospitals are significant channels for delivering the communicative acts in relation to information of hospitals’ facilities and expertise to international medical tourists. However, studies that involved communicative acts have mainly focused on examining the language mode. I...

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Main Authors: Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim, Intan Safinaz Zainudin, Nor Fariza Mohd Nor
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2022
Online Access:http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/1/55054-184417-1-PB.pdf
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author Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim,
Intan Safinaz Zainudin,
Nor Fariza Mohd Nor,
author_facet Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim,
Intan Safinaz Zainudin,
Nor Fariza Mohd Nor,
author_sort Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim,
building UKM Institutional Repository
collection Online Access
description Websites of private hospitals are significant channels for delivering the communicative acts in relation to information of hospitals’ facilities and expertise to international medical tourists. However, studies that involved communicative acts have mainly focused on examining the language mode. It overlooked the multimodal perspective which hinder prospective international medical tourists from receiving the intended promotional messages. This study, therefore, aims to examine multimodal realisations of representative and commissive communicative acts in Thailand’s private hospital website. Within Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective, Halliday & Matthiessen’s model of textual analysis (2004) and Daneš’ classification of thematic patterns (1974) were utilised for language analysis, while Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework was adopted for visual analysis. Three webpages from a Thai private hospital website were analysed in relation to theme types and thematic progression for textual function in language analysis, and information value, saliency and framing elements for compositional function in visual analysis. Results based on the analysis of the communicative acts in the selected webpages aimed to inform and persuade prospective medical tourists. The multimodal communicative acts created a technologically established, sophisticated, reliable and caring representation of Samitivej Hospital through the high occurrence of unmarked themes, reiteration patterns, salient visuals and absence of framing. The findings provided communicative strategies to promote medical tourism to copywriters, website designers and medical tourism stakeholders in designing such websites.
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spelling oai:generic.eprints.org:199222022-09-28T16:00:31Z http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/ Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim, Intan Safinaz Zainudin, Nor Fariza Mohd Nor, Websites of private hospitals are significant channels for delivering the communicative acts in relation to information of hospitals’ facilities and expertise to international medical tourists. However, studies that involved communicative acts have mainly focused on examining the language mode. It overlooked the multimodal perspective which hinder prospective international medical tourists from receiving the intended promotional messages. This study, therefore, aims to examine multimodal realisations of representative and commissive communicative acts in Thailand’s private hospital website. Within Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective, Halliday & Matthiessen’s model of textual analysis (2004) and Daneš’ classification of thematic patterns (1974) were utilised for language analysis, while Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) framework was adopted for visual analysis. Three webpages from a Thai private hospital website were analysed in relation to theme types and thematic progression for textual function in language analysis, and information value, saliency and framing elements for compositional function in visual analysis. Results based on the analysis of the communicative acts in the selected webpages aimed to inform and persuade prospective medical tourists. The multimodal communicative acts created a technologically established, sophisticated, reliable and caring representation of Samitivej Hospital through the high occurrence of unmarked themes, reiteration patterns, salient visuals and absence of framing. The findings provided communicative strategies to promote medical tourism to copywriters, website designers and medical tourism stakeholders in designing such websites. Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia 2022-05 Article PeerReviewed application/pdf en http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/1/55054-184417-1-PB.pdf Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim, and Intan Safinaz Zainudin, and Nor Fariza Mohd Nor, (2022) Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism. GEMA ; Online Journal of Language Studies, 22 (2). pp. 88-110. ISSN 1675-8021 https://ejournal.ukm.my/gema/issue/view/1518
spellingShingle Wan Fatimah Solihah Wan Abdul Halim,
Intan Safinaz Zainudin,
Nor Fariza Mohd Nor,
Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title_full Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title_fullStr Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title_full_unstemmed Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title_short Multimodal communicative acts of Thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
title_sort multimodal communicative acts of thailand’s private hospital website promoting medical tourism
url http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/
http://journalarticle.ukm.my/19922/1/55054-184417-1-PB.pdf