“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.