General English Proficiency

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.

Demotivation is a relatively new topic in the field of second or foreign language acquisition which is in need of more rigorous research. In this regard, the present study was an attempt to investigate demotivating factors in learning English as a foreign language in an Iranian context. To this end, 382 Persian learners of English were selected through stratified clustering sampling procedure to participate in this mixed method study. The Data was collected through a 40-item Likert type questionnaire. The Factor analysis of the data extracted seven factors including a) inadequate facilities, b) reduced self-confidence, c) class characteristics, d) lack of purpose to study English, e) teaching methods, f) teachers and teaching styles, and g) negative attitudes toward English and the culture of English-speaking countries as demotivators. The Students’ perceptions of these seven factors were compared based on their general English proficiency levels. The Results revealed that low proficient learners perceived reduced self-confidence and negative attitudes more demotivating than their counterparts at other levels of proficiency.