Abstract:
The most significant target of tourism-related higher education institutions is to enable its students to have healthy and qualified communication with tourists after graduation process, which heavily depends on technical and professional education levels of employees in the sector. Accordingly, foreign language education is the most crucial part of professional education, and English teaching is one of the priorities for tourism education in higher education. Therefore, it is vital for tourism faculties to have adequate and qualified foreign language courses. Foreign language ability of students in a 4-years degree tourism programme, in particular non-EMI (English Medium Instruction) ones, is regarded low. The Tourism Education Evaluation and Accreditation Board (TURAK), which has an important place in increasing the quality of tourism education, states that an undergraduate student “will demonstrate reading, understanding, speaking and writing skills in English" as the output of tourism education programs, and has determined the minimum amount of foreign language education hours for sufficiency and quality on the basis of departments. Accordingly, the board has stated that a student should receive at least 672 hours of English education in the Gastronomy and Culinary Arts program, the Recreation Management program, the Tourism Management program, and at least 784 hours in the Tourism Guidance program during 4 education years. Although the number of English course hours has been determined high by TURAK working under the Higher Education Quality Council (YÖKAK) that conducts studies to improve education process in universities, graduated students cannot acquire the success in foreign language at the desired level, which constitutes the fundamental research question. The project’s aim is to determine the current situation, deficiencies and issues in English teaching and improve teaching strategies and recommendations with help of British language experts. In the project, mixed research methods were used to get an answer to the research question in order to compensate for the weaknesses of quantitative and qualitative research methods correspondingly. Probability-based simple random sampling method and non-probabilistic judgmental sampling method were used in quantitative research and qualitative research, respectively. 835 questionnaires (552 of them are valid) were gathered; 76 interviews were conducted; a comprehensive observation process was realized in the research. All stakeholders (students, instructors, managers) were included in the research. In the project, English teaching process of 3 Turkish tourism faculties (Tourism Faculty of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Tourism Faculty of Nevsehir Hacı Bektaş Veli University and Beysehir Ali Akkanat Tourism Faculty of Konya Selçuk University) is analysed by Turkish research team. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest that students are generally satisfied with the English education in tourism faculties whereas the results of interview and observation analyses demonstrate that there is a major room for improvement in English education about which the research team presents recommendations to improve English education in tourism faculties.