ELTU3010 English through Popular Art and Culture is a multidisciplinary, interest-oriented level-three course tailored for students from diverse academic backgrounds across the Faculty of Arts at CUHK. The course focuses on developing curation and narration—complementary spoken and written communication skills—to support students’ language development within and beyond their undergraduate studies.  

The course emphasises how curation and narration, essential language skills that play a pivotal role in everyday acts of meaning-making, can be applied to popular art and appreciation through a theme-based approach. Themes include, but are not limited to, identity and soul, truth and beauty, pain and trauma, love and hate, explored across disciplines within the settings of Popular Art and Culture. Each theme, delivered as a module, is taught through a variety of popular art forms, such as theatre and drama, television, film and anime, media, documentary, popular music, literature, and the fine arts. Lessons are structured around class activities designed to illustrate the principles of curation and narration using selected sources. Each week, students engage with a diverse range of materials, including readings, video excerpts, songs, and visual or digital art, all aligned with the lesson's theme. 

The course also aims to deepen students’ awareness of the humanities—how people understand, interpret, and communicate about the world and their place in it—through engagement with the module themes and class activities. In this course, curation extends beyond traditional gallery, exhibition, or museum contexts to include verbal presentations that involve the selection, organisation, and interpretation of subject matter within Popular Art and Culture. Narration refers to the written articulation, based on the verbal presentation, that structures and conveys meaning through analysis and storytelling. Upon completing the course, students will have acquired the ability to adapt and integrate these spoken and written communication strategies into their own areas of study and interest, enhancing their discipline-specific presentation and expression. They will develop not only linguistic competence but also creative confidence in expressing ideas across cultural and artistic contexts. 

Advisory: Year 3 students of the Faculty of Arts.