An english curriculum for future professionals of administración turística y hotelera (ath) academic programme

Abstract

Being competent in English Language is a key element to access more and better opportunities in the world. Nowadays, English is considered a crucial tool for professionals in different areas, and this opinion is shared by researchers who consider they must get an acceptable English proficiency level to apply for any job, to travel, to study and in general, to communicate in different scenarios. This is the case of Colombia, where many companies and industries such as the ones working on the Tourism and Hospitality field require bilingual staff to offer better services to customers who do not speak Spanish or have a very low competence on it. At this point, it is important to define what being bilingual means. A person is bilingual when he/she “can produce complete meaningful utterances in the other language” (Haugen, 1953). According to García (as cited in Baker, 2011) being bilingual not only means to master the four skills but only two skills: Some bilinguals actively speak and write in both languages (productive competence), others are more passively bilinguals and have receptive ability (understanding or reading). For some, an ability in two or more languages is well developed. (p. 3) Bathia and Ritchie (2013) refer to bilingualism as “the coexistence, contact, and interaction of different languages.” They say that the coexistence takes place at the societal level or the individual level. In relation to the societal level many different languages can be spoken and used by different groups of people. The individuals themselves may not necessarily be bilingual but they could be if their community as a whole recognizes only one language for public use through legislation and other forms of regulatory control.

English has gone beyond the classrooms and has been recognized as the international language. People learn English not only to travel or to live abroad but also to study, to make friends, to do business and to interact in many ways and fields. At Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia, the students of the academic programme of Administración Turística y Hotelera have in their curriculum four general English courses that, according to the data collected and analyzed, are not enough to interact proficiently in the Tourism and Hospitality industry. This need was the starting point of this research study, which gives researchers the opportunity of analyzing the best option to help those students to acquire the communicative skills to interact in the Tourism and Hospitality industry when becoming professionals. Consequently, researchers propose an English curriculum design based on CLIL for the ATH students to be followed after they have finished the four General English levels. Then researchers proceeded to pilot one of the units, evaluated and adjusted it, and finally concluded that communicative skills can be improved, increased and fostered through the implementation of an English curriculum design and there are many strategies that can be used to achieve this purpose.