"TALKING ACROSS THE WORLD" Symposium: Professional Communication in the Digital Age

Dr Jane Lockwood is currently Adjunct Associate Professor and member of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her key area of research is how technology is impacting workplace communication and she has published widely on this topic in the Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) industry in Asia. She has mostly recently co-authored a coursebook for business communication with Neil Elias Developing Business Communication in Asia: a simulated case study approach. (Routledge)

Priscilla Angela T. Cruz is an English teacher with the Ateneo de Manila University. She is interested in developing pedagogic innovations that are grounded in linguistic research. Her interests involve educational linguistics, language variation, positive discourse analysis, and Systemic Functional Linguistics. She is working on projects that involve transdisciplinary approaches that allow for language scholars to make an impact in solving community problems.

Erika Darics is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of applied linguistics, (computer-mediated) discourse analysis, and business communication. She is the co-author of the widely adopted book Language and Business, Language at work. She works as a senior lecturer of applied linguistics at Aston University, UK and co-hosts the Word and Actions podcast. She is passionate about language and discourse awareness in soft skill education and tweets as @LinguaDigitalis.

Neil has worked in Asia for the past twenty five years, including Hong Kong, India, PRC, and the Philippines, where he set up and managed service centres for a US Financial Services corporate and a European IT Services company. He served on the board of the Philippines Industry Association, BPA/P. As a member of acquisition teams he helped negotiate joint ventures in Shanghai and Vietnam, and has also set up companies in Chengdu, Hong Kong and Manila.

Gail Forey is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, University of Bath. Gail has carried out research and published in the areas of professional communication, discourse analysis (written and spoken), language education and training and teaching development. Her research on workplace communication focuses on language related issues in the offshore outsourcing and globalised digital workplace communication. Before joining Bath University, Gail taught in Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, Hungary, and the UK. In Hong Kong, she worked at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and received the President’s Award for Teaching 2014 and the Hong Kong University Teacher of the Year Award 2015, and PolyU's Knowledge Transfer Award 2017.

Yan has 20 years of global experience across China, Australia and India markets. She is an expert in strategic planning, new market development, social innovation, cross-culture business communications, etc. With unique and proven models built around innovative and digitally advanced practices, Yan has been a keynote speaker at various renowned platforms, including the 1st India Tourism Mart 2018, hosted by the Tourism Ministry, India, and International Youth Forum organised by China Radio International in 2019. She is an Executive MBA from Peking University - Guanghua School of Management. Doctoral study in progress at Fordham University-Gabelli school of business, USA

Li Xin, associate professor, PhD in Economics and Post-doc in Linguistics, has been teaching Business English courses for more than 10 years in mainland China. She seeks to innovate and reform teaching methods to constantly enhance teaching efficacy and talent cultivation quality to facilitate students to access the passage leading to future successful career. The university-enterprise collaboration and practical competition-based teaching approaches have been well-accepted by her students and proved effective to simultaneously improve students’ language skills, business knowledge and comprehensive capabilities. She keeps on doing the data-driven action research on Business English teaching and has several publications in the Journal of International Trade, the Journal of PLA University of Foreign Languages, Foreign Language and Literature and etc.

Dr Lifei Wang is professor of the School of Translation and Interpreting, and dean of Global Language Services Academy, Beijing Language and Culture University, China. He visited Faculty of Education, Hong Kong University in 2002, and department of linguistics, UC Berkley and Georgetown University respectively in 2010 and 2018. His academic interests include applied linguistics, language in international business, economics of language, language services science, translation markets, etc. He teaches courses on corpus linguistics, introducing language services science, research methods in business language studies, theories and application of language for international business, to undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral students. He is Co-Chairman of the China Forum on Language Services 40, and Chairman of the National Committee of English for International Business in China. He has published over 100 research articles on language education, business linguistics, and language services in SSCI and CSSCI-indexed journals and is author of books or reports such as “Computed Aided Research Methods in L2 Studies”,” Influences of L1 Literacy on L2 Writing: A Study of Chinese Tertiary EFL Learners”, “Studies on Nominalization in Business English Discourse”, “Bluebook of Language Services for Globalizing Chinese Enterprises”, “Report on Anti-COVID -19 Emergency Language Services”.

Xiaoyu XU is an assistant professor in the Department of English at City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Specific Purposes (ESP), corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics. In a recent collaboration with Dr. Jane Lockwood, she investigated webchat exchanges for e-commerce customer service, which has been published in the Journal of English for Specific Purposes. She is also the coordinator of one of the largest Gateway Education courses, English for Business Communication, offered at CityU. This course is undergoing a substantial revision as requested by the College of Business.