Letter from the Chair-Elect

Anne Lomperis, Language Training Designs, Montgomery Village, Maryland, USA

Dear Colleagues,

I am honored to be your Chair-Elect for 2025-2026. While I have a long history with the ESP IS, this letter nevertheless serves as an introduction. I will also invite English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) specialists to participate in an initiative to connect through a monthly EOP Chat Group.

History with ESP IS and with EOP

It was the autumn of 1975 – halfway through my 2.5-year MATESOL program at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, USA. Saigon had fallen in April. During that summer, the count of Southeast Asian refugees who arrived in the US reached 125,000.

A group of us graduate students checked with our department chair. Did we know enough TESOL yet to offer a legitimate program for refugees who had arrived in town? He assured us we knew more than volunteers who might offer such a program. So, we found a church with the most classrooms available Monday-Friday, 6-9 pm, to serve 100 refugees per night.

I had given up ballroom dance classes to teach these earnest refugees. Most of them, in those first-wave days, were judges, doctors, and other high-stature professionals. They were humbly cleaning toilets at motels. I was appalled. Thus was born my career-long commitment to English for upward workforce opportunity.

My first job after graduating in 1976 was to create the English Language Services of one of the ten refugee resettlement agencies approved by the US Office of Refugee Resettlement. In 1983, I co-founded the Refugee Concerns Interest Section (RCIS) of TESOL. By 1992, I had helped to found the English for Specific Purposes Interest Section (ESPIS) of TESOL.

As the first EOP Representative to the ESP IS Steering Council, I spearheaded an initiative to develop international standards, or Best Practices, in workplace language training. We co-authors established review teams in 45 countries, and, collectively, we worked for 9 years to go to publication in 2003.

The Best Practices focused primarily on needs assessment for curriculum development, or Instructional Needs Assessment (INA). From there, I expanded the framework to address the needs of the organization (ONA – Organizational Needs Assessment) at the management level. Later, I added Economic Needs Assessment (ENA) to the framework. This was to align EOP programs with economic development policies and priorities (P&P) at the national level.

These expansions of an EOP framework were derived from working across a wide range of industry sectors. These sectors have included hotels and cruise lines, banking, call centers, health care, veterinary services, manufacturing, paper mills and printing, oil and gas exploration, elastomer technology, Afghan dam construction and irrigation canals, agriculture, fisheries, Iraqi air force and police force, legal English and human rights English, California Department of Transportation road construction, and aviation.

This work has been conducted in 20 countries, predominantly with developing economies -- in Asia, Central Asia, Russia / Siberia, the Middle East, and Central / South America. I was also born and raised through high school graduation in South India. So, developing countries are where I feel most at home, but where I see the need for economic development.

Monthly EOP Chat Group

As I reflect on the current circumstances of our ESP IS members who specialize in EOP, I observe that many are solo entrepreneurs who operate in relative isolation. To offer more professional connection, I propose we meet monthly as an EOP Chat Group. To share conveniently in real time, I suggest we schedule sessions in four world time zones.

Over my long years in EOP, I have also found that substantive teacher training in EOP itself is quite limited. So, I would encourage our Chats to address professional development topics, as well.

For example, consider questions from the above framework:

• ENA – How can EOP best align with the principles and priorities (P&P) of economic development at the national or regional level? (Consider my list of 14 P&P, so far, for such analysis.)
• ONA – How can we identify the costs an organization is sustaining due to low proficiency in its labor force – and then carry out calculations for return-on-investment (ROI) that a professionally sound EOP program can bring? (Martin & Lomperis, 2002)
• INA – How do we conduct systematic collaboration with industry experts? (Consider my recent impromptu white paper on collaboration -- with new insights. Consider also Key Language Patterns across industry sectors for more efficient EOP curriculum development – per research with Andy Mattingly, AI guru and new ESP IS EAS Representative.)

To join the EOP Chat Group, please fill out the form: https://forms.office.com/r/RZiq0jzAVd. Here’s to less isolation and more connecting!

Reference

Martin, W. M., & Lomperis, A. E. 2002. Determining the cost benefit, the return on investment, and the intangible impacts of language programs for development. TESOL Quarterly, 36(3), 399–429.

Anne Lomperis is Chief Solution Partner at Language Training Designs, her solo entrepreneurship founded in 1989 and based now in Greater Washington, DC, USA. Her specialty is English for Occupational Purposes (EOP) in support of national economic development, organizational management issues, innovative technology in training delivery, and systematic collaboration with industry experts for customized curriculum development. She is also very committed to EOP professional development for improved quality of service provision, greater recognition of EOP value-add, and therefore increased income generation at industry scale for a worldwide cadre of EOP career specialists.