خلاصة:
International tourism and its related businesses have considerably increased recently. Due to this expansion, tourism employees must be able to communicate appropriately, and effective ESP programs need to be administered accordingly. Many studies have been conducted on current ESP courses for tourism; however, major problems still remain in designing ESP courses to satisfy L2 learners’ needs, especially those learning ESP in Iranian universities. The current study was an attempt to investigate the language needs of Iranian graduate students of tourism management based on their wants, lacks, and necessities. This mixed methods study involved a questionnaire and semistructured interviews with graduate students, English instructors, subject-specific instructors, and experts in tourism management. Despite the fact that wants, lacks, and necessities were not highly similar, based on the findings, it was concluded that all the 4 language skills need to be emphasized in their ESP courses in order to satisfy the specific needs of tourism management graduate students.
ملخص الجهاز:
Language Needs of Graduate Students and ESP Courses: The Case of Tourism Management in Iran Aasa Moattarian¹ & Mohammad Hassan Tahririan² ¹Sheikhbahaee University, moattarian@shbu.
The current study was an attempt to investigate the language needs of Iranian graduate students of tourism management based on their wants, lacks, and necessities.
Despite the fact that wants, lacks, and necessities were not highly similar, based on the findings, it was concluded that all the 4 language skills need to be emphasized in their ESP courses in order to satisfy the specific needs of tourism management graduate students.
Generally, Iranian graduate students do not acquire enough knowledge of English to express their views in important educational arenas (Moslemi, Moinzadeh, & Dabaghi, 2011).
g. , Blue & Harun, 2003; Coskon, 2009; Laborda, 2002; Lin, Wu, & Huang, 2013; Yi-Hsuan, 2012); however, there are still major problems in designing real ESP courses for Iranian students to satisfy their needs.
Because a better understanding of learners’ real needs and expectations facilitates determining course objectives and helps teachers to design appropriate tasks and teaching activities, in this study the primary focus was exploring real ESP needs of tourism management students.
7%) According to Table 1, the learners wanted their ESP courses to focus on all the four language skills because they believed they needed English in various situations in their future jobs.
Students’ Wants With Regard to Language Skills Another important point investigated in this study was the evaluation of the offered ESP courses to see whether they had been successful in satisfying the learners’ needs.