“Just wanna give you guys a bit of an update”: Insider perspectives on business presentations in Hong Kong

• Pedagogically motivated study of oral presentations in Hong Kong’s service industries.
• Findings based on surveys, interviews, case studies and conference calls.
• Presenters often need to provide a report or update in less than 5 min.
• Findings reveal fundamental differences between academic and business presentations.
• Main challenge for Hong Kong presenters is to engage the interest of the audience.

Oral presentations are a core component of many business English courses and yet they have been the subject of surprisingly little research in contexts where English functions as a business lingua franca. This article seeks to narrow the gap between the office and the classroom by examining the nature and frequency of English-language presentations in Hong Kong’s major service industries and the challenges that Cantonese-speaking professionals working in these industries experience when planning, organising and delivering presentations in a second language. The article draws on a substantial set of quantitative and qualitative data: two large-scale questionnaire surveys, 31 semi-structured interviews, four case studies and 10 English-mediated conference calls. The findings indicate that presenting in English is a regular part of local professionals’ lives, particularly those working for foreign-owned companies, and that they find four aspects of presentations particularly challenging: engaging the interest of their audience, dealing with questions spontaneously and authoritatively, communicating in a natural spoken style and incorporating PowerPoint slides smoothly into the flow of their presentations.