The genre of syllabus in higher education

This article examines the genre of syllabus in higher education. In particular, it focuses on the intertextuality and interdiscursivity of paper-based and web-mediated syllabi and the ways they are used to promote links between various academic – classroom and research – genres and discourse communities. The corpus consists of ten syllabi with different interactivity levels. To avoid discrepancy in content, only syllabi for introductory linguistics courses offered at several US universities have been selected. The study shows that the syllabus is not only a document, but also a site of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. It is also demonstrated that the syllabus is utilized by instructors both to manifest their membership in multiple discourse communities and to socialize students into (some of) them. Finally, it is suggested that even though the digital medium increases interactivity of the syllabus, web-mediated and paper-based syllabi can still be treated as instantiations of the same genre.