Academic and Occupational English Needs of Tourism and Hotel Management Students. Oral Communication Skills in Focus

Master's Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 3.97 on a 4.0 scale, Haramaya University (School of Foreign Languages and Journalism), course: Teaching English as a Foreign Language, language: English, abstract: The purpose of this study was to identify the oral communication skills that Tourism and Hotel Management students (THMS) at Haramaya University need for their academic and career purposes. Particularly, this study aimed to assess the value of specific oral communication skills within occupational contexts, identify oral communication problems of THMS and explore the communicative events that arise during oral interactions. To attain the objectives, this research employed cross-sectional survey design and explanatory method for data analysis. The practitioners' questionnaire was distributed to 110 tourism and hospitality guest-facing practitioners, and THMS (n=70) filled in THMS' questionnaire. A semi-structured interview was conducted with 3 subject area lecturers. The quantitative data were processed by using SPSS 20 while the qualitative ones were coded based on semantic affinity for analysis. The study revealed that listening skills such as comprehending colloquial and idiomatic expressions, understanding guests' multifarious English accents, recognizing meaning shift because of change in intonation and stress are worthwhile for THMS' prospective careers in tourism and hospitality sector. Effective communication with guests on the phone, clear and direct speech, interpretation without meaning distortion and appropriate responses to guests' requests and complaints were found to be equally important speaking skills. Similarly, eye-contact, facial expressions, gesture, tone and pitch volume were found to be the salient non-verbal communication behaviors that should comply with the communicative contexts during oral interactions. The research indicated that most THMS lacked spoken production skills, spoken interaction skills and nonverbal communication skills. It also showed that the communicative events that arise during oral communication in occupational and academic contexts require THMS to have good command of oral proficiency. Therefore, it can be concluded that THMS' current oral proficiency may adversely affect their academic performance and employability skills. Based on the findings, the researcher recommends oral communication trainings that can enhance THMS' academic involvements and employability skills, and the inclusion of oral communication courses in THM curriculum for prospective use.

Born on 01 April 1990 and brought up in a small rural village in Ethiopia, Yeneneh went to school at the age of 7. He attended his first cycle primary education at Addis Alem Primary School. In 2002, he joined Dima Ghiorgis Primary School, 15 km northeast of his village, to pursue his second cycle primary education (grades 5-8). After completing primary school, he enrolled at Belay Zeleke Secondary School, which is located in Bichena Town, to attend his high-school education in 2006. He, then, followed the preparatory program at Belay Zeleke Preparatory School from 2008 to 2009. Having finished the program and passed the university entrance examination, he studied English at Bahir Dar University from 2010 to 2012. Receiving his BA in English, he began teaching English at Fitawurari H/ghiorgis Primary School in Addis Ababa in 2013. After two years of teaching, he became a Graduate Assistant I (GA I) in the School of Foreign Languages and Journalism at Haramaya University. In the academic year of 2015/16, as per the grant of the university, he joined a postgraduate program to pursue his M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). Currently, Mr. Yeneneh is an instructor at Haramaya University, Ethiopia. His research interests include ESP syllabus design, multimodality and interIntermediality in EFL classrooms, critical pedagogy, academic discourse analysis, and intercultural communicative competence.