Professional Communication

Professional Communication presents ten studies of communication practices in a variety of professional contexts. By drawing on diverse methodologies from fields such as conversation analysis, intercultural communication, and organizational studies, the essays here examine how language is constructed, managed, and consumed in various professional situations, ranging from academic settings to business negotiations. One important theme of the book is its emphasis on the collaboration between researchers and professionals. The contributors strongly believe that such collaborative partnership will provide direct implications for improving workplace communication and enhance better understanding of the construction of professional identity and organizational behaviour.

This book will appeal to not only scholars and researchers in discourse analysis, intercultural communication and professional studies, but also practitioners in the related fields and disciplines.

Winnie Cheng is a professor in the Department of English and director of the Research Centre for Professional Communication in English at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests include corpus linguistics, conversational analysis, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, discourse intonation, and intercultural communication in business and professional contexts. Kenneth C. C. Kong is an associate professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hong Kong Baptist University. His main research interests include discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, multi-modal analysis, English for specific purposes, functional linguistics, and language education.

“This is an interesting and useful collection—original, insightful, and informative. The two main themes of the volume, collaborative work between practitioners from language and the professions, and intercultural or cross-cultural analyses, go together nicely. There is a strong need to have more research and published work in both areas, especially in the first one. In this respect, Professional Communication fits very well the needs of the disciplinary gaps.” —Vijay Bhatia, Department of English, City University of Hong Kong

“This excellent collection of original papers is remarkable in several ways: by its timely emphasis on researcher-practitioner collaboration and authorship, its focus on interculturality both interethnically/lingually and within and across institutions, and thirdly, how it proclaims a distinctive international voice which broadens all our perspectives.” —Chris Candlin, Department of Linguistics, Macquarie University, Sydney