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Centre for Applied English Studies

Obituary

Polly Tse 1979-2016

It is with deep and genuine sadness that we announce the recent death of Polly Tse who died on 18th March after a 16 month long battle with cancer.  She was just 36 years old.

Tse Hing Yiu Polly, was a friend, colleague and specialist in the field of English academic literacy.  She worked in the Centre for Applied English Studies from 2010 teaching a range of students and coordinating English courses for the department of Nursing.  She was a lively, sensitive and hardworking colleague, supportive of both students and colleagues alike. At the same time as teaching she was studying part time for a PhD in the centre, undertaking a corpus and interview study to discover differences in how junior and senior scholars write. She was due to submit her dissertation in June this year.

I first met Polly in the summer of 2000 when I interviewed her for a research assistant post at CityU. She had recently graduated with a BA in Contemporary English Language at Polytechnic University and was looking for her first job. Initially engaged in the legwork of travelling around Hong Kong universities scanning paper texts to compile an electronic corpus, she soon came to be a partner in the project. Her intelligence and enthusiasm took the study in new directions and inspired my own interest. I continued to find funding to employ her on a series of projects until I left for London and Polly gained a scholarship to study an MPhil at Chinese University, under the supervision of Peter Skeehan. She completed this in 2005 with a thesis on gender variations in academic book reviews. She went on to teaching jobs at the Institute of Vocational Education and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology until I returned to Hong Kong and headhunted her to work at CAES. During this time she had started a PhD at Reading University but left when her supervisor, Paul Thompson, moved to Birmingham. She started again at HKU.

Polly was an exceptional academic who loved research and university life. Employed in jobs that often involved heavy teaching loads, she not only found time for her students and a part-time PhD in applied linguistics, but also to publish over 15 papers and book chapters. Her publications focused on the corpus analysis of academic discourse, and her work can be found in leading journals such as Applied Linguistics, TESOL Quarterly,  JEAP, English for Specific Purposes,  Journal of Pragmatics,  Functions of Language,  Discourse Studies, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, and Text and Talk.

Outside the office and classroom, Polly was a keen hiker and a practising Buddhist, both of which gave her a calm temperament and an ability to appreciate the beauty around her and to ride the challenges that life sometimes presents us with. All who knew her will acknowledge what an energetic, positive and thoughtful person she was; always optimistic and never overwhelmed by adversity.  Polly's cruel departure is a tremendous loss and she will be greatly missed by her colleagues in the centre, by her students, and by her husband and family.

Ken Hyland
29 March, 2016