Call for Papers: The 2nd 'Talking Across the World' Conference



The Second “TALKING ACROSS THE WORLD” Conference
English Communication Skills for the ITES Industry
May 31st (Thursday) – June 2nd (Saturday) 2007
MANILA, Philippines

www.talkingacrosstheworld.com

CALL FOR PAPERS

As the Information Technology Enabled Services – ITES – industry is increasingly being outsourced to non-English speaking destinations, the need for good English language communication skills is acute. At present the single biggest problem to industry growth in this area is English language communication skills.

The applied linguistic research that has started in this industry is fascinating and the potential is enormous. At present, a number of research bids have been submitted to look at issues of language assessment, curriculum development, corpus building and quality measurement in this industry.

We are keen to invite academics who have been working in this area or a related area to submit a paper for this conference.

Specifically, the conference will address the issues of:

1. Modes of Adult Learning in the workplace

This will cover papers related to adult learning principles; modes of delivery (e.g. classroom based training- class/small group/ individualized support; autonomous learning); stages of professional development (e.g. novice – expert level capacity);coaching and mentoring.

2. Assessing language for work impact
This will cover papers related to language and communication assessment practices in the BPO industry e.g. examples of how homegrown assessment works in house and for what purposes; the role of commercially available business English testing instruments.

3. Academic and workplace partnering
This will cover papers related to how workplaces and the tertiary sector inter relate in the provision of employment related skills with specific reference to language and communication skills development at the secondary and tertiary levels.

4. Curriculum innovation and evaluation in language education at the workplace
This will cover papers related to how language research can inform the development of training materials; the syllabus design process from planning to implementation to evaluation; development of teacher education and trainer/coaching support programmes.

5. Intercultural communication and its place in training
This will cover papers related to how intercultural awareness impacts the success of outsourced BPO work;
critiques of existing programmes in intercultural training and ideas for more effective training and awareness raising for culture.

6. Discourse analysis and linguistic research
This will cover papers related to linguistic analyses of different aspects of BPO interaction and transaction, both spoken and written e.g call centre exchange and email/chat support.

Plenary papers will be 1 hour and all other papers will be 40 minutes (30 minutes presentation and 10 minutes questions and answers).

For further details, please visit our conference website: www.talkingacrosstheworld.com
Deadline for submission is 15th January 2007.

RCPCE
Research Centre for Professional Communication in English
English Department, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
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http://www.engl.polyu.edu.hk/RCPCE/
Tel : (852) 2766 4364
Fax: (852) 2333 6569