ENGLISH MISSION STATEMENTS OF VIETNAMESE TERTIARY EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS: AN ANALYSIS OF LOGICAL MEANING

Abstract

A mission statement serves as an organisation’s guiding declaration, defining its core purpose and the fundamental reasons for its existence (Komives, Lucas, & McMahon, 1998). By addressing the questions “What are we going to do?” “How?” and “For whom?”, a tertiary education institution’s mission statement communicates its core roles and functions to stakeholders, including faculty, staff, students and their families, industries, and the general public. Generally, mission statements are often concise and typically constructed with clauses linked by specific logical dependency relations, which indicate whether clauses are presented as equally important or if one depends on another, and logico-semantic relations, which demonstrate how the clauses are semantically connected. In this study, the English mission statements of 106 two-cycle accredited tertiary education institutions in Vietnam were investigated. The analytical framework was based on Systemic Functional Linguistics, with the focus on the logical meaning and the systems to realise it. The findings showed the dominance of parataxis and expansion, especially extension. The analysis of the multilayer of meaning in the mission statements revealed intriguing insights into how tertiary education institutions in Vietnam showcase their roles, functions, identity and status to the stakeholders, and revealed how certain tasks and objectives might be prioritised through the use of clause complexing strategies.