Dr Jane Lockwood will introduce her new book “Developing Global Business Communication in Asia: A Business Simulated Case Study Approach” in June 2021 in an book launch online event organised by the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English and the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. More information will be available online… Continue reading Teaching Business Communication in Asia: a new book by Dr Jane Lockwood
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“Talking Across the World” Symposium -Professional Communication in the Digital Age
21 May 2021 (UTC+8) on Zoom supported by Hong Kong Customer Contact Association [ Please come back end of April, 2021 for the registration information ] Talking Across the World (TAW) is a forum for academia and industry to exchange ideas, share experience and research around the key issues in professional communication. The theme for the… Continue reading “Talking Across the World” Symposium -Professional Communication in the Digital Age
New resource for English teaching in Hong Kong primary schools
Professor Kathleen Ahrens, Director of RCPCE, launched a new tool recently to assist teachers in Hong Kong to teach the English language to Primary One to Primary Six students. This resource is designed to teach English with ten selected children’s picture books that incorporate the context of Hong Kong daily life. This resource is part… Continue reading New resource for English teaching in Hong Kong primary schools
Introducing MSDIP: A Method for coding source domains in metaphor analysis
Organised by Department of English and Research Centre for Professional Communication in English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Abstract Conceptual metaphor analysis is an important part of many metaphor studies (e.g., Ahrens & Jiang, 2020; Dodge, Jisup, & Sitckles, 2015; Steen, 1999, 2011), because conceptual metaphors are considered to provide a window onto human thinking (Lakoff… Continue reading Introducing MSDIP: A Method for coding source domains in metaphor analysis
How an African leader used metaphor as a political weapon against colonialism
Kwame Nkrumah (1912-1972), a pioneering pan-Africanist and Ghana’s independence leader (1957-1966), is regarded by many as one of Africa’s greatest politicians. Commentators, historians and scholars have given him accolades such as ‘the Black Star’, ‘Africa’s Man of Destiny’ and ‘the Pride of Africa’. Twenty years ago, the BBC’s African listeners voted him as Africa’s Man… Continue reading How an African leader used metaphor as a political weapon against colonialism
Publish, Perish, and Cookie-Cutter Research: The Catch-22
The mantra ‘publish or perish’ originally coined by Archibald Coolidge in 1932, though dreaded, is now a reality. Contemporary academic life has become largely a negotiation with the ‘regime of publication’, resulting in another maxim: ‘publish and flourish’. It seems then that to remain a competitive academic means an upgraded understanding of the game: to… Continue reading Publish, Perish, and Cookie-Cutter Research: The Catch-22
Writing Style: Plain writing and persuasive writing
The importance of writing style is to help your readers to follow and understand the meanings and concepts embedded in your writing. In his book, Johnson-Sheehan (2002) pointed out that writing styles are effective on the sentence level, on the paragraph level and at the document level. On the sentence level, writers should pick the… Continue reading Writing Style: Plain writing and persuasive writing
Cross-cultural awareness in international negotiations
In his book English for International Negotiations: a cross-cultural case study approach, Drew Rodgers states that “The art of negotiating involves finding a balance between achieving the best possible result, while at the same time establishing a mutually beneficial working relationship with your counterparts.” (Rodgers, 1998, p. 1) Several suggestions were given to establish an atmosphere… Continue reading Cross-cultural awareness in international negotiations
Using a professional corpus for conceptual framing in corporate governance
Corpus driven linguistic research extracts the meaning of a concept from a corpus. This article demonstrates how a professional corpus helps business executives to understand the meaning and concepts of technical words used in the industry. Different industries have their own technical words and phrases. For example, ‘Internal Audit’ is frequently used in finance and… Continue reading Using a professional corpus for conceptual framing in corporate governance
Using a professional communication corpus for business writing
Corpus is a collection of authentic texts compiled for the study of real-life language usage. Corpus is also compiled to build language models for machine learning or to compile dictionaries. A compiled corpus is useful for language users to find real-life language examples to enhance their communication proficiency. The two well-known corpora available online is… Continue reading Using a professional communication corpus for business writing