Abstract:

This paper researches what research universities’ engineering departments in USA and China frequently talk about in their self-introduction texts which are built as a corpus. Critical discourse analysis is used to find the hot words, word clusters and so on. The research finds that, first, the discourse mode of engineering education in the two countries is highly similar because of the title system, degree system and reward system. Second, in terms of educational concept, there are similarities and differences between the two countries in understanding the core concepts of engineering, research and engineer. Finally,the word “engineer” is not a hot word in the engineering education of both countries where engineers are educated.

Key words: research university, engineering education, corpus of self-introduction texts, critical discourse analysis