A Needs analysis for the ESP Classes at the tourism education department of the trade business and tourism education faculty of Gazi Üniversity

Abstract

ABSTRACT Title: A needs analysis for the ESP classes at the Tourism Education Department of the Trade Business and Tourism Education Faculty of Gazi University. Author: GUltekin Boran Thesis Chairperson: Dr. Phyllis L. Lim, Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program. Thesis Committee Members: Dr. Arlene Clachar, Ms. Patricia J. Brenner Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program. Needs analysis is crucial for ESP (English for Specific Purposes) curriculaxbecause it provides valuable data in order to set the goals, objectives, and aims of a curriculum and contributes to the appropriateness of a curriculum for students' needs and purposes. Johns (1991) emphasizes the importance of needs analysis for ESP curricula, and states that ESP practitioners should develop new techniques to reveal the language tasks the learners will have to perform in their target situation instead of guessing at learners' target needs. The students of the Tourism Education Department of the Trade Business and Tourism Education Faculty of Gazi University in Ankara, Türkiye, take 4-6 class hours of English per week for tourism purposes. The lecturers who are in charge of teaching ESP at the department write their syllabuses and select the course materials depending only on their intuitions about the students' communication needs in their future work domain. However, according to the results of preliminary informal interviews, these students are generally unsuccessful in communicating with their foreign interlocutors in English in the job settings where they do their summer apprenticeships. Therefore, considering that the learners' purposes in learning English and the communication requirements of the situation in which the learners will use English should be revealed, this study attempted to reveal the students' perceptions of their communication needs, as wellas the ESP lecturers' and the tourism subject lecturers' perceptions of the students' communication needs. This study also attempted to reveal whether what is provided for the students in ESP classes at the Tourism Education Department meets what is required by the students' future work domain. In this study, data were collected from three different subject groups by means of three versions of the questionnaire. The subject groups consisted of 100 students, 10 tourism subject lecturers, and 3 ESP lecturers from the Tourism Education Department. The most notable finding gathered from the responses of the students and the ESP lecturers show that the students did not practise frequent or effective speaking and listening activities in their ESP classes although all subject groups assumed that speaking and listening were the most important language skills in the students' future work domain. Despite this agreement, there were also discrepancies among the subject groups' perceptions of some issues. For instance, the students and the tourism subject lecturers considered translation the least important language skill, whereas ESP lecturers saw translation the third most important language skill for the students' target situation, after speaking and listening. It is hoped that the findings of this study will be useful in designing a curriculum for the ESP classes at the Tourism Education Department of Trade Business and Tourism Education Faculty of Gazi University.