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:
- 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.
 
-  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. 
 
- 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.
 
- 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.
 
- 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.
 
- 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.comDeadline  for submission is 15th January 2007.