An Investigation of the Interaction between Professionals in Medical Laboratory Setting in Hong Kong

People at work talk everyday, if not all day. Many workplace activities are achieved through talk. It is not surprising that there is a growing body of literature on interaction at workplace in various settings. However, research focusing on interaction between professionals or colleagues in Hong Kong settings is still rare. To fill the gap, this research intends to study spoken interaction recorded in a medical laboratory from which agreement for data collection has already been obtained. The research data will mainly consist of recordings of interaction among employees in the laboratory, supplemented with ethnographic information of the participants and of the workplace. This research is exploratory in nature, aiming at:discovering distinctive features and interactional patterns between professionals in the workplace under examination;identifying potential interactional difficulties arising in the interaction; andexamining any strategies employed by participants to handle the interactional difficulties.It is expected that the findings of the research will contribute to our knowledge of workplace interaction in the context of Hong Kong, and serve as a specimen from which possible issues may be identified for further study on workplace interaction in general.