Author Information
Catherine Shee-hei Wong, Hong Kong Metropolitan University, Hong KongWenxin Li, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Abstract
This article examines how curriculum reform is condensed, ranked, and legitimised when a long policy text is repackaged for rapid professional uptake. It focuses on the leaflet and three posters released with Hong Kong’s English Language Education Key Learning Area Curriculum Guide (Primary 1–6) in 2025, using the 2017 guide and one of its curriculum-framework diagrams as a contrastive backdrop. The study combines social-semiotic multimodal analysis with a corpus-assisted comparison of approximately 74,843 words in the 2025 guide and 70,310 words in the 2017 guide. Visual coding addressed information value, salience, framing, colour, represented participants, modality, and metaphor; lexical frequencies were normalised per 10,000 words and selected differences tested with log-likelihood. The findings show that the companion materials do more than summarise the guide. Paths, trains, arrows, colour-coded clusters, and repeated values icons turn reform into a coherent journey with an implied sequence and destination. National-security and patriotic discourse rises sharply in the 2025 text and is integrated visually into the same cheerful ecology as reading, values education, collaboration, and resource provision. By contrast, global orientation, linguistic plurality, and learner difference receive little comparable visual anchoring. Teachers appear as coordinators of guided activity, while pupils are active mainly within preconfigured routes. The article argues that such artefacts perform policy work by configuring the first reading of reform: they make priorities memorable, place ideologically charged content within an ordinary pedagogical register, and narrow the field of what is immediately visible without determining how schools will enact the policy.
Paper Information
Conference: ECAH2026Stream: Humanities - Teaching and Learning
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
This paper is part of the ECAH2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
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To cite this article:
Wong C., & Li W. (2026) Selling Curriculum Reform in Colours: Multimodal Packaging of English Policy Texts in Hong Kong (2017–2025) ISSN: 2188-1111 – The European Conference on Arts & Humanities 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 395-413) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2026.30
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1111.2026.30
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