This article tracks the socialization of a Chinese intern into a Hong Kong PR company and considers the factors that enabled her to move toward acquiring the discourse of the profession. Taking a case study approach, the research is based on a detailed daily journal written by the intern during her internship, and two interviews. Over the 3-month…

This study is a genre analysis which explores the specific discourse community of tax accountants. Tax computation letters from one international accounting firm in Hong Kong were analyzed and compared. To probe deeper into the tax accounting discourse community, a group of tax accountants from the same firm was observed and questioned. The texts…

Principles of ethnographic inquiry are used to address professional training needs of English-for-Special-Purpose teachers interacting with clients in a business environment. A course designed for English teachers in Hong Kong that explores "discourse communities" is described. (Contains 25 references.) (Author/LB)

Considerable research has now been undertaken into the development of different approaches to exploiting language corpora for pedagogic purposes in the context of ESP. The question of how language corpora might be utilized by students beyond the immediate language-teaching context is, however, one as yet seldom addressed in the literature. This…