The Duality of Communicative Purposes in the Textbook for Construction Engineering and Architecture: A Corpus-based Study of Blurbs.

Although the textbook has traditionally been assigned a peripheral status in the repertoire of academic genres, in tertiary education settings it plays an essential role as a source of both content and generic literacy, hence acculturating novices into the epistemology of the discipline. However, the role of the textbook in the professional context has been to date relatively underexplored. he aim of this paper is to define the textbook as a textual product linking the academic and the professional. Corpus-based results of a study of the online blurbs which accompany construction engineering and architecture textbooks show an intricate merging of descriptive and promotional features which provides a valuable source for understanding the way authors and target audience interact and the way authors and audiences conceive the textbook genre. he analysis of the blurb moves shows a duality of communicative purposes, translated into a multifaceted discourse meant to accommodate the linguistic and rhetorical needs of a duality of audiences, both learners and professional peers. Corpus findings call for a reconceptualization of the textbook genre, as a genre addressing both an educational and a professional audience, and whose purpose is thus only partially educational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]