Assessing pragmatic ability of Thai hotel management and tourism students in the context of hotel front office department

Abstract

The objectives of this study were: (1) to assess the students’ pragmatic ability in the context of hotel front office department; (2) to study whether the levels of English proficiency have a significant effect on the students’ pragmatic ability and investigate similarities and differences of linguistic forms related to pragmatic ability produced by the students with different levels of English proficiency; and (3) to investigate the errors that interfere with the students’ pragmatic knowledge. The subjects were 90 fourth year Thai university students related to hospitality services from private and public universities in Bangkok. Stratified random technique was applied to obtain the sample size of the students in each language ability group according to their GPA in English courses. The research instruments included a needs assessment questionnaire, the Front Office Pragmatic-Test (FOP-Test), and a pragmatic questionnaire. Descriptive statistics was carried out to assess the students’ pragmatic ability and the recognition of pragmatic knowledge. One-way ANOVA was employed to observe the effect of English proficiency on the students’ pragmatic ability. Content analysis and frequency counts were conducted to reveal linguistic forms and pragmatic failures. The findings of the study were as follows. First, the FOP-Test could distinguish the students’ pragmatic ability into high, average, and low levels. Second, there was a significant main effect of the levels of English proficiency on pragmatic ability. In addition, the use of politeness markers and the address forms were distinctive linguistic features that differentiated the students’ pragmatic abilities while the routine patterns, formulaic expressions of regret, adverbials, affirmation markers, and the use of the “we” were performed similarly in all groups. Finally, the students’ levels of English proficiency did not affect the degrees of recognition in pragmatics. Besides, the students in all groups performed pragmatic errors in both pragmalinguistics and sociolinguistics. These errors were perceived as ineffectiveness and inappropriateness in the hotel staff-guest interactions. The findings provided more insights in pragmatic production of Thai students in hospitality services. The study also contributed pedagogical and assessment implications related to ESP/EOP teaching in specialized contexts, particularly hotel industry English.