'Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM Press)'
Abstract
Websites of private hospitals are significant channels for delivering the communicative acts in
relation to information of hospitals’ facilities and expertise to international medical tourists.
However, studies that involved communicative acts have mainly focused on examining the
language mode. It overlooked the multimodal perspective which hinder prospective international
medical tourists from receiving the intended promotional messages. This study, therefore, aims to
examine multimodal realisations of representative and commissive communicative acts in
Thailand’s private hospital website. Within Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective,
Halliday & Matthiessen’s model of textual analysis (2004) and Daneš’ classification of thematic
patterns (1974) were utilised for language analysis, while Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006)
framework was adopted for visual analysis. Three webpages from a Thai private hospital website
were analysed in relation to theme types and thematic progression for textual function in language
analysis, and information value, saliency and framing elements for compositional function in
visual analysis. Results based on the analysis of the communicative acts in the selected webpages
aimed to inform and persuade prospective medical tourists. The multimodal communicative acts
created a technologically established, sophisticated, reliable and caring representation of Samitivej
Hospital through the high occurrence of unmarked themes, reiteration patterns, salient visuals and
absence of framing. The findings provided communicative strategies to promote medical tourism
to copywriters, website designers and medical tourism stakeholders in designing such websites