Language assessment for the business processing outsourcing industry

The business processing outsourcing(BPO)industry domiciled in the USA,UK, Australia and New Zealand is rapdly expanding into such non-English speaking destinations as Eastern Europe, South America, India, China and the Philippines. However, many BPO multinational companies are experiencing great difficulty in screening and recruiting for BPO work,particularly in the call centres.These companies are also having difficulty in diagnosing where communication is breaking down on the calls and in maintaining good quality service standards. There has been great disappointment with commercially available business English tests in providing language assessment solutions for this fast-growing industry. This poster session will: (i) describe the BPO industry need for langauge assessment (ii) describe a solution currently being developed by the industry and a training porvider in the Philippines(the Business Processing Language Assessment Scales -BUPLAS) (iii)outline a series of language assessment research questions emanating from industry and language trainers in BPO worksites