The Cultural Economy of Tutorial Centers in China: A Multimodal Analysis of Tutorial Advertisements

• In Event: AERA Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: Semiotics in Education: Signs, Meanings, and Multimodality SIG Poster Session

Abstract

The scale of Chinese Private supplementary tutoring (PST) industry was estimated to be worth over 100 billion US dollars and advertisements of this industry are ubiquitous in Chinese metropolitan space. Current literature cannot portrait the full scene of PST in China and studies foraying into PST advertisements are scarce. To fill the gap, we conduct a multimodal critical discourse analysis of five tutorial advertisements collected in Beijing subway stations during my ethnographic fieldwork. Informed by the concept “cultural economy”, we reveal how advertisements represent PST and what cultural messages these advertisements convey. We argue that the PST advertisement in Beijing, as a “cultural economy”, signifies a form of parenting inherited and reproduced from the Chinese traditional culture.

Author

• Zhen Tao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong