Profile
May L-Y Wong is a Lecturer in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and a Fellow of Advance HE (UK). She holds a PhD from Lancaster University, as well as a First Class Honours Bachelor's degree and an MPhil from HKU. With over two decades of teaching experience across leading tertiary institutions, she has contributed to the School of Humanities (Linguistics) and the School of Professional and Continuing Education at HKU, as well as the Department of Linguistics and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. Her research interests centre on interdisciplinary inquiry, particularly the intersections of language, visual and media studies, culture, and heritage. Adopting a transdisciplinary approach, she explores language and communication through the lenses of multimodality, social issues, gender, and cultural identity – particularly within Hong Kong’s dynamic media landscape. Her monograph, Multimodal Communication: A Social Semiotic Approach to Text and Image in Print and Digital Media (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), along with articles published in journals such as Semiotica, Chinese Semiotic Studies, and Asian Languages and Linguistics, investigate the city’s distinctive history and politics, and its rich, culturally diverse heritage. Her work draws on visual and verbal repertoires found in public and commercial advertising, new(s) media, museum artefacts, and Cantonese slang. She also specialises in digital humanities, employing both quantitative and qualitative methods to examine (cross-)linguistic features of Hong Kong English and English-Chinese translation. Her research appears in leading peer-reviewed journals including Linguistics, International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Journal of Pragmatics, and Languages in Contrast, as well as in her monograph Hong Kong English: Exploring Lexicogrammar and Discourse from a Corpus-Linguistic Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). Most recently, she completed the Professional Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education from HKU’s Teaching and Learning Innovation Centre and successfully obtained Communication-Intensive (CI) badging for her undergraduate modules Language and Advertising and New Englishes.
corpus linguistics; cognitive linguistics; discourse analysis; multimodality; social semiotics; translation studies; World Englishes (with particular reference to Hong Kong English).
