Internationalisation and Globalisation. A Multimodal Analysis of Italian Universities’ Websites

Through a multimodal discourse analysis approach, this study tries to identify the verbal and non-verbal distinctive features of the collected data based on a sample of Italian universities' official websites. I will also compare the organization of signs on the web pages and frameworks of the websites of Italian universities to a sample of British universities. The potential meanings these may hold for users and how they may relate to the ongoing processes of internationalization and globalization in online environments will be taken into account. A social semiotics perspective will allow to investigate how signs are displayed on the screen through the interaction of a variety of modes including images, colours, writing, font and layout.