Plenary

Researching and Teaching ESP:
Insights from Hong Kong

Winnie Cheng
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
The Research Centre for Professional Communication in English (RCPCE), Departmentof English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University was established with an important goalof promoting ESP teaching and research through collaboration across different disciplines,
businesses and professions. This paper describes two corpus studies, namely profession- andgenre-specific phraseologies and the speech act of <Opine> markers, and discusses somemain findings to underscore the value and importance of collaboration between ESP
researchers and professionals.

In Hong Kong, the Department of English of The Hong Kong Polytechnic
University (PolyU), driven by the mission of “Linguistic Excellence in ProfessionalContexts”, has been conducting research and scholarship with a focus on applied
linguistics, sociolinguistics, and professional communication. In 2005, thedepartment established the Research Centre for Professional Communication in
English (RCPCE) with two goals:
1. To investigate the purposes, nature and patterns of communication
through the medium of English in business and professional contexts.
2. To promote ESP teaching and research through collaboration acrossdifferent disciplines, businesses and professions.
To attain these goals, the RCPCE has been involved in many collaborativeand interdisciplinary research projects with the pillar industries in the Hong
Kong economy, resulting in the compilation of a group of profession-specificcorpora. RCPCE has also adopted a range of research methods in language andcommunication, including corpus methods.
This paper describes research findings of a couple of ESP research studies that11

Chenghave analysed RCPCE profession-specific corpora, accessible on http://rcpce.
engl.polyu.edu.hk/index.html, namely a study of the phraseological variation ofdiscipline- and profession-specific English language and a study of the speech actof <Opine> marker in Hong Kong English textbooks. The paper concludes withESP pedagogical implications.

Corpus approach to ESP research

A corpus is defined as “a collection of pieces of language text in electronic form,
selected according to external criteria to represent, as far as possible, a language orlanguage variety as a source of data for linguistic research” (Sinclair, 2005, p. 16).
The RCPCE has, over the years, created a number of profession-specific corpora,as follows:• Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE) (0.9 million words)• Hong Kong Corpus of Surveying and Construction Engineering(HKCSCE) (0.57 million words)• Hong Kong Engineering Corpus (HKEC) (0.92 million words)• Hong Kong Financial Services Corpus (HKFSC) (0.73 million words)• Hong Kong Corpus of Corporate Governance Reports (HKCCGR) (1million words)• Hong Kong Corpus of Corruption Prevention (HKCCP) (0.55 millionwords)
To date, ESP as well as language and communication studies have examined
the RCPCE profession-specific corpora in terms of discourse markers, cohesive
devices, vocabulary, grammars, lexico-grammar, metaphors, multi-word
units, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, (critical) genre analysis, andmultimodality. Specifically, corpus linguistic research has investigated different
kinds of recurrent patterns of the English language, including the behaviourof words and multi-word phrases; grammatical patterns; semantic features;
discoursal, generic, interactional, and pragmatic features; and textual properties.

12Researching and Teaching ESP, OCJSI 2, pages 11-18

Discipline- and profession-specific English
language: phraseological variation

The study compared two kinds of phraseologies, namely n-grams and concgrams,
in a corpus of engineering ordinances (139,176 words), extracted from the Hong
Kong Engineering Corpus (HKEC). The aim of this study was to examine andcompare trigrams and 3-word concgrams to show the extent to which they arehelpful in revealing the aboutness of the specialised professional corpus examined.
According to Phillips (1989), the phraseology of the language contained in a text
or a corpus can reveal the ‘aboutness’ of the discipline or profession.
The notion of “concgram”, proposed by Cheng, Warren, & Greaves (2006) isdefined as sets of words that co-occur regardless of constituency variation (e.g.,AB and A*B), positional variation (e.g., AB and BA), or both.
Table 1 shows the most frequent ten trigrams and ten 3-word concgrams in
the Engineering Ordinances Corpus, with frequencies of occurrence (Table 1).
Table 1
Most Frequent Trigrams and 3-Word Concgrams in the Engineering Ordinances Corpus
Trigrams (Frequencies)

3-Word Concgrams (Frequencies)

the water authority (186)of/the/to (2,452)

no person shall (139)

and/of/the (2,263)

the contractor shall (127)a/of/the (2,186)

in respect of (113)in/of/the (2,080)

in relation to (108)of/shall/the (2,070)

project division emsd (108)be/shall/the (1,815)

referred to in (107)be/of/the (1,703)

in the case (100)of/or/the (1,695)

liquefied petroleum gas (92)for/of/the (1,311)

in accordance with (91)a/in/the (1,152)

13

ChengTable 1 shows that some of the trigrams, comprised of lexical words, or lexicaland grammatical words, can rather readily be associated with the discipline ofengineering, and thus indicating ‘aboutness’, such as ‘the water authority’, ‘thecontractor shall’, ‘project division emsd’ (Electrical and Mechanical Services
Department), and ‘liquefied petroleum gas’. Other trigrams are neither readily
associated with engineering nor the genre of ordinances, despite ‘shall’ in ‘noperson shall’ and ‘the contractor shall’. These and the remaining trigrams need to
be studied in the respective concordances to identify general meanings or specificmeanings, be they engineering-specific, ordinances-specific, or engineering
ordinances-specific.
The group of three-word concgrams is equally, if not more, interesting anduseful for understanding the genre of engineering ordinances. All are made ofgrammatical words. In the following, the concordance of the most frequent
three-word concgram ‘of/the/to’ (N = 2,452) was examined. Three kinds ofvariations have been identified, and they are:1. the current status of each module to be monitored
the supply of gas to any premises
the prevention of annoyance to persons travelling
2. The Ordinance applies to certain types of projects
3. to prevent the further escape of gas
This small-scale study confirms the value of both n-grams (in this case,trigrams) and concgrams (in this case, 3-word concgrams) in the study of theaboutness of a discipline, a profession, and even a genre. The findings related
to trigrams show that the n-gram list could, to various degrees, reveal the“aboutness” of a corpus, especially a specialized corpus such as the English
Engineering Ordinances Corpus. Examination of the concordances canfurther reveal the contextual meanings associated with the n-grams understudy. However, although concgrams, made up of grammatical words, appear
to be rather meaningless, concordance analyses of concgrams can much betterand much more clearly reveal the structural components of the complex
nominalisations or clauses constructed by the concgram.

14

Researching and Teaching ESP, OCJSI 2, pages 11-18

Hong Kong English textbooks: The <Opine>markerSince 2005, a series of research studies has compared the use of different speechacts in a self-compiled specialized Hong Kong English language textbook
data set and the business sub-corpus (0.23 million words) of the Hong Kong
Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE). The textbook corpus consisted of fifteen
textbooks endorsed by the Education and Manpower Bureau of the Hong Kong
Government (equivalent to a Ministry or Department of Education) for use in
Hong Kong’s upper secondary schools. The speech acts examined are namely
correcting others and self-correction, checking understanding, interruption,giving an opinion, and disagreement.
The comparative study of giving an opinion (Cheng & Warren, 2006)
involved comparing the speech act of <Opine>, defined by Stenström (1994)
as: “<Opine> expresses the speaker’s personal opinion, his/her feelings andattitudes” (pp. 90–91), which are “generally realised by a declarative andprovided with both lexical and prosodic <Opine> markers” (pp. 90–91).
Examples of lexical <Opine> markers are “I feel, I think, it seems, it’s a pity that,it’s surprising that, it’s …” (p. 91).
Table 2 shows the frequencies of different <Opine> markers in the businesssub-corpus of HKCSE.
The following shows some linguistic realisations of giving an opinion inthree of the fifteen textbooks examined:
I think ..., I believe …, Personally, I find this ..., In fact, I ... (Esser, 1999, p. 32)
Personally, I think that …, In my opinion ..., As I see it ..., In my view ..., Actually
I don’t agree that ..., I think it’s interesting that ..., From my point of view ..., I
suppose that ..., It seems to me that ... (Duncan, 2001, p. 10)
In my opinion ..., I think ..., I feel that ..., It seems to me that ... (Lee & Holzer,1999, p. 77)
Major comparative findings in the textbooks are described, as follows:• The number of <Opine> markers across the fifteen textbooks varies fromfour to nine.
15

ChengTable 2Opine Markers: Frequencies of Use in the Business Sub-Corpus of Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken
English (HKCSE) (0.25 million words)
Opine markers

Frequencies

I + think

602

It’s

386

I + know185

I + say133

I + like112

I + sure55

the / one + thing + is37

I + guess30

I + feel27

It / everything + seems

26

I / find

24

I / believe22• 82.7% of the 1,714 speaker opinions are realised by just 6 <Opine>markers (I + think, It’s, I + know, I + say, I + like and I + sure).
• I + think (35.1%) is the most frequently occurring <Opine> marker, andonly this <Opine> marker is found in all of the fifteen textbooks.
• The textbooks contain only four (I + think, I + sure, I+ feel, and It/everything + seems) of the top ten <Opine> markers in the business subcorpus (Table 1), and so exclude some of the most frequent forms (It’s, I+ know, I + say, I + like, the/one + thing + is, and I + guess) (see Table 1).
• At the same time, the textbooks emphasise <Opine> markers which
are rarely used by speakers in the data, such as I + believe (1.3%), I + see(0.6%), my + view (0.5%), my + opinion (0.5%) and I suppose (0.35%).
16

Researching and Teaching ESP, OCJSI 2, pages 11-18• None of the textbooks provides and teaches any examples of negative
constructions.
• None of the textbooks gives any indication as to whether or not the<Opine> markers are in rank order based on frequency of use.

Conclusion and implications

The first study reported in the paper is a corpus-driven one, meaning that theresearcher acts as a “language detective”, seeking answers to questions that can befound by means of corpus queries. Their task is to identify the recurrent patterns
found in the corpus output lines (concordance lines) and make generalizations.
The implication of this study is that the corpus linguistic information generated
electronically, which is not available in a dictionary or a thesaurus but, withthe right training provided to students and professionals, is available throughsearching a profession-specific corpus.
The findings of the first and related studies have been disseminatedat continuing professional development (CPD) seminars to members ofengineering associations to share with them phraseological corpus findings fromthe specialised corpora they own. In addition, professional communication
training programmes have been conducted for members of relevant professions.
The second study is a corpus-based one, with the <Opine> markers identified
in the textbooks used as search items when examining the business sub-corpus in
the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English (HKCSE). Main findings show thatthe writing of the English textbooks examined tends to rely on the introspectionsof the textbook writers rather than real-world language use. Based on theconclusion of the study, it is suggested that textbook writers need to pay greaterattention to real world language use when exemplifying speech acts. Teachersand students should be aware that ‘textbook rules’ are not necessarily valid asgeneralizations. If space is limited, the most frequent <Opine> markers shouldfeature prominently in the textbooks.
Language corpora can clearly make important and useful pedagogicalcontributions to English language learning and teaching. Corpora, such as thebusiness discourse corpus in the second study, provide a better point of reference
17Chengfor what is said and how than the intuitive notions of textbook writers.

References

Cheng, W., & Warren, M. (2006). I would say be very careful of…: <Opine>markers in an intercultural Business corpus of spoken English. In J.
Bamford & M. Bondi (Eds.), Managing interaction in professional discourse.
Intercultural and interdiscoursal perspectives (pp. 46–58). Officina Edizioni.
Duncan, J. (2001). Expression: oral practice for AS-level. Precise Publications.
Esser, D. (1999). Teach & practice: AS-level oral English for Form 7. Pilot
Publications.
Lee, I., & Holzer, V. (1999). Skills building for AS Use of English. Longman
Phillips, M. (1989). Lexical structure of text. English Language Research.
Sinclair, J. (2005). Corpus and text - Basic principles. In M. Wynne (Ed.).
Developing linguistic corpora: a guide to good practice (pp. 1–6). Oxbow
Books.
Stenström, A.-B. (1994). An introduction to spoken interaction. Longman.

Author Bio

Winnie Cheng is a retired Professor, and former Director of Research Centre forProfessional Communication in English (RCPCE), of the Department of English
at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is a founding fellow of the Hong
Kong Academy of Humanities. Her research interests include corpus linguistics,
conversational analysis, critical discourse analysis, discourse intonation, EAP,ESP, intercultural communication, pragmatics, and writing across the curriculum.
<winnie.cheng@polyu.edu.hk>
Received: October 20, 2019
Accepted: September 9, 202018