Community college marketization in Hong Kong : a critical discourse analysis of student stories

Abstract

Against the backdrop of community college marketization in Hong Kong’s higher education landscape, this thesis offers a critical discourse analysis of a) 66 student stories collected from the websites of HKUSPACE Community College and Hong Kong Community College and b) their respective multimodal and hypertextual website environments. Since the early 2000s, community college education in Hong Kong has developed exponentially in the private market, hinting at the high demand for this type of education. Interestingly, community colleges are still considered subpar and students entering these institutions are often regarded as the “losers” of Hong Kong’s education system. In what ways do these institutions manage to promote themselves in such a situation has so far not been studied. As for discourse-analytic research into higher education marketization, there is also a paucity of research examining a less-favored type of institutions in a marketized, stratified sector. Another observation based on a thorough review of literature is that while students are key participants in higher education, previous analyses have yet gone beyond suggesting they are consumers of education. It is this lacuna that this thesis aims to fill. This is done through analyzing student stories, which are a representative feature of community colleges’ promotional discourse on the web.

The current study operationalizes marketization via considering the notion of recontextualization, understood here as the strategic reproduction and reaccentuation of meanings in a specific context. Two complementary angles of analyzing recontextualization, which are related to the strategic structuring of information (genre) and salient representations in texts, are taken up to explicate the discoursal manifestations of community college marketization in the data.

From the perspective of genre, the study proposes to look at both the generic environments (the website environments where student stories are shaped and read) and the generic structures of the stories. The analysis identifies that a set of highly conventionalized multimodal and hypertextual semiotic resources, which performs homogeneous functions, exists in HKUSPACE CC’s and HKCC’s websites. In terms of generic structures, the stories also contain nearly the same sets of moves and strategies of high prominence. The foremost function carried out by the key generic and semiotic features is to foreground community colleges as a springboard to university education. In analyzing representations of students, community colleges and community college education in the data, this thesis traces a dual function performed by these representations: to promote the community colleges and to allow community college students claim legitimacy. This dual function is more salient in HKUSPACE CC’s stories, as more facets of representations are in them. This analysis also discovers a double bind between displaying community colleges as a means of getting university education and showing these institutions to be of value in their own right.

It is hoped that this study will stimulate discussions or even scholarly studies that engage critically with the role of community colleges in Hong Kong and the perceptions of the students studying at these institutions.