Teaching English for specific purposes has always been challenging as it involves a skill-based teaching methodology to develop learning and use specific grammar and lexicon to understand texts in specialized texts. As for other professions, teaching EFL learners about tourism and hotel management also requires the acquisition of vocabulary, grammar, and general communication skills in varied situations and contexts. To this end, this paper focuses on the comparison and assessment of vocabulary inferring skills of ESP learners majoring in Tourism and Hotel management. To conduct the present study, 10 contextualized vocabulary items were selected, then the VKS test (Vocabulary Knowledge Scale; Wesche & Paribakht, 1996) was administered to 56 Iranian students of Tourism and Hotel Management studying at Islamic Azad University, South Tehran branch. It was hypothesized that learners who show better general English language knowledge perform more skillfully in inferring the meaning of specialized words in Tourism and hotel management texts than less competent ones. Descriptive as well as inferential statistics proved the hypothesis. The results of the present research have implications for ESP learners and teachers as well as materials developers of Tourism and Hotel management textbooks.
