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

The 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.