Multilingual writing in a marketised university: a critical multimodal study of student service advertisements

ABSTRACTThe global marketisation of higher education has been evidenced by a wide range of discursive phenomena. This article examines how several sets of student service advertisements in a Hong Kong university employ multilingual writing to promote tailored services and experiences to different groups of student ‘consumers’. It draws on approaches from critical discourse studies, multimodality and research on language and the market to unpack and critique the semiotic and discursive mechanisms through which several deliberately designed multilingual texts help the advertisements pursue specific marketing goals. The analyses show that the examined multilingual writing practices (help) promote consumerist and hierarchical ideological approaches to multilingualism and multiculturalism in a higher education institution under the continuing influences of its Western colonial history and a globalised, Asian neoliberal knowledge economy.KEYWORDS: Multilingual writingCritical discourse studiesMultimodalityMarketisationHigher educationHong Kong Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Admittedly, there are many cases of Chinese-English bilingual writing in CEDARS’s publications which are excluded from the focal dataset of the study. These cases are usually brief (bilingual) names of material publishers or activity organizers such as CEDARS. I did not choose to discuss on them as these bilingual texts are simplistic cases that are much more of an authoritative, institutional discourse than of a promotional/marketing discourse which has been selected as the empirical focus of this study.