When a company operating in English employs professionals for whom English is a foreign/second language, the company is obliged to provide language training for its employees. Otherwise many of its manpower, some in key posts, may be handicapped by poor speaking, reading or writing skill. However, the company is not interested in its employees acheiving fluency or advanced level, though this can be desiraable. The main concern of the company is that communication for the purposes of job performance is effective. In other words the training provided here should be in the shortest possible time and should be tailored to the communication needs of the employee. Then with reference to my previous blog we can say that EOP is training not education.

Let us illustrate this with some examples: a switchboard operator who is fluent in spoken English is, of course, ideal for this post. However, a non-native speaker with such level of English would not accept the job of a switchboard operator. Most probably the job will attract some school leavers with some spoken language. But they need to attend language classes before they start the job. The training need here is to develop the listening and speaking skills that will enable them to answer the phone, offer help, connect the caller or say why he can not and offer to take a message. These are the minimum requirements of the job. In a three-week training course the operators will be able to do this. Yet they will frustrate when some callers use unfamiliar expressions and vocabulary.

In other words the company is responsible for training the employees to do their jobs - not to read English newspapers and write articles there. This nature of the type of language skills required in the different jobs make 'English for Occupational Purposes' training and not education. An engineer who is required to write 'Technical Reports' can develop the skill by attending a six-week part-time course. However, he may find it difficult to socialize with native speakers in the social events of the company. Nevertheless, unless it is part of his job to receive and entertain visitors, the company is not interested in developing his language skills in this area.

Many of the training department of companies operating in English approach language training for their employees inappropriately by sending to public ESL courses in town and make them move from one level to another and eventually when the different levels have been completed the complain that the one-year courses attended did not improve the skills of the employee.

Any training including language training should be based on an accurate process of identifying training needs and should be designed and implemented by a language specialist well informed in ESP/EOP and language training.