Inter-institutional agreements for academic international cooperation: a discursive investigation of roles prescribed to higher education institutions

Abstract

The Scientific and Technological Agreements for International Cooperation (STAICs) between higher education institutions, and/or technical educational institutions and/or business institutions is part of the discourse of higher education, and constitutes an element of strategic importance in the process of the internationalization of higher education. However, there is little information about the relation between the language used in the academic agreements and the practices they represent. In order to contribute to this area of research, ten (10) STAICs between 5 Brazilian Higher education institutions and 7 foreign education institutions were analyzed in order to make a description of textual and contextual elements of this particular discourse. Regarding their configuration as a text, the STAICs were investigated in terms of their generic structure potential. Transitivity choices and instances of modality were analyzed in order to look at, respectively, the representation of the universities in relation to the roles prescribed to them and their level of commitment towards those roles. Regarding contextual concerns, the STAICs were analyzed in terms of the power relations considering the performance of the participating universities in the enactment of those roles. The analysis draws on genre analysis (Hasan, 1985a, 1994, 2004), other genre studies (Meurer, 1998, 2002), Halliday#s (1994; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) Systemic Functional Grammar, notions from Giddens# (1979, 1984) Structuration Theory and the Law of the Subsidiary Character of the Scientific Production from Ramos# (1965) Theory of Sociological Reduction. Results have provided linguistic grounds to characterize this discourse as a type of promotional discourse as well as to show hidden evidence of power relations between its discourse participants. iv The results are expected to contribute as support for the fields of EFL teaching, Applied linguistics, Discourse Analysis including ESP and Business English, and Social Sciences.