A Needs Analysis of Applying an ESP Program for Hotel Employees

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has been applied in English education for many decades. ESP becomes more and more important in the university lately. Except for opening the ESP courses for the vocational college students, the university also designs particularly ESP programs for much industry and university cooperation. According to Dudley-Evans (2001), ESP program is designed to meet the specific needs of the learners. It is a learner-centered approach to develop the learners' language competence for being successful on the job or academic needs. The ESP programs focus on increasing learners' English competence in many specific disciplines, such as tourism, nursing, medical science, business, or information technology. Recently, many people pay attention to their relaxations so that Taiwan has more and more foreign visitors for tourism. It is obvious that tourism, hotels, and related industries are flourishing. In order to provide better hotel services in local hotels, English communicative ability of local hotel employees has to be improved under the circumstance. Based on the need of ESP, the researcher plans to design an ESP program for the hotel non-English native speaking employees. For this reason, the researcher intends to conduct a plan to collect useful data of the needs analysis before practically applying the ESP program in the local hotel of southern Taiwan, Kenting. This study does not come out with any result of the needs analysis and significant findings yet. This research aims at exploring Taiwanese employees' and employers' perspectives of ESP program in a local hotel of Kenting. The author will use three instruments including questionnaires, interviews, and meetings by collecting data form a Kenting hotel employees, employers, and stakeholders. After analyzing these data, the researcher will develop an ESP curriculum to train Taiwanese hotel employees' English competence.