Contemporary investigations in teaching cross-cultural business communication to pre-service tourism specialists

Abstract

The article analyses contemporary researches of teaching cross-cultural business communication to pre-service future tourism specialists. The readiness of prospective tourism specialists to provide efficient job activities presupposes their cross-cultural communicative competence development which implies their foreign language ability to communicate successfully with business partners and consumers of tourist services. Foreign languages for tourism purposes help not only to operate, persuade, make decisions, but also to create a favourable business atmosphere, understand other cultures and mentality of people. Nowadays, one of the important tasks is to get pre- service tourism specialists ready to communicate in foreign languages successfully and meet professional requirements. Prospective tourism specialists should be able to take part in seminars, fairs, exhibitions, business negotiations, conclude and contracts, issue professional documents, carry on business correspondence, speak over the telephone, socialise on the Internet, write summaries and CVs which involves direct and indirect cross-cultural business communication. The purpose of this paper is to review current problems of teaching foreign languages to pre-service tourism specialists for theoretical substantiating of the author’s conception of teaching English language cross-cultural business communication skills to students majoring in tourism. The analysis results showed timely character of this issue. The previous research experience and the author’s own study may become fundamentals for theoretical grounding the conception for building English language cross-cultural business communication skills of pre-service tourism specialists.