Needs Analysis on English Teaching for Tourism and Hospitality Management Students

Abstract

This study examines the need for English language teaching for the Tourism and Hospitality Management students in the Sri Lanka Institute of Tourism and Hotel Management. Accordingly, the main objective of the study is to investigate whether there is an area to be improved in the English course according to the needs of the students and ultimately to develop the course to get the best learning outcome from it. This research was conducted in the mixed-method research approach incorporating both primary and secondary data. Primary data were collected through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews and the secondary data were collected through journal articles, magazines, book chapters etc. Under the convenience sampling, 30 students who are following the degree program in Tourism and hospitality management were selected as the sample of the study. A questionnaire was shared in Google forms and conducted semi structured interviews with three students. The interviews were conducted after obtaining the responses of the questionnaires to further collect data on the responses obtained from the questionnaire. The questionnaire is given online and consists of questions comprising 5 categories, namely students’ personal information, students’ need for learning English, Language Skills and aspects, satisfaction with the teaching materials and teaching approaches, students’ perception about the English learning process. In addition, semi structured interviews were conducted to get the necessary information on the use of English language materials and teaching approaches used in the classroom. There were 10 questions altogether with two open ended questions and they were analyzed using Minitab Statistical Software and Thematic analysis. After analyzing the data, it was found that the majority of the students focus to master the speaking and writing skills from the course, but they are not satisfied with what they have facilitated to master those skills. Most of the time traditional language teaching approaches were used in language teaching. Accordingly, the results of this need analysis study indicate that new teaching materials focusing on speaking and writing skills should be implemented at this institute and there is a need of updating the teaching materials regularly. The traditional teaching approaches should be replaced with more interactive teaching approaches such as communicative language teaching approach, task-based, content and language integrated teaching approach etc. The teaching materials and approaches should facilitate the needs of the students focusing more on practice rather than theory and English for Specific purposes is recommended.