英文摘要
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Nowadays, the Taiwan Ministry of Education (MOE) and colleges are encouraging students to participate in the internship program. It is believed that the internship program can help students to earn practical skills, gain work experiences, realize the work environment and find out their interest. Since English has become an international language and gradually dominated in many areas, the need of English is rapidly increasing, and people are getting more and more aware of its importance for every industry. English ability is crucial in the promotion of the employment rate and the improvement of the hospitality industry in Taiwan. Decent English ability helps build up employees’ confidence, and enhance their serving quality when they need to communicate with English-speaking customers efficiently.
In the hotel industry, enhancing serving quality is very essential because it concerns serving not only the local customers but also English-speaking people. Hotel employees may have fewer problems serving the local customers, but serving English-speaking people could be stressful. They need to communicate in English to understand what the customers require. English majors are equipped with the language ability, so receiving internship in the hotel industry is becoming common. This study was conducted through quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate English majors’ expectations, experiences and perceptions towards internship in the hotel industry. It also aims to reveal the interns’ suggestions to modify the curriculum of the English departments in technological universities. The data was collected through focus group with semi-structured interview and questionnaire survey.
According to the interns’ responses, their main expectations are to strengthen their communication and interaction skills, learn relevant workplace skills and gain work experience. After finishing their internship, they thought internship helped them to learn interaction and communication skills, strengthen their problem-solving and thinking ability, have right attitude towards job and improve personal articulation. However, the interns were not familiar with the work environment and did not handle their duty well at the beginning. By asking colleagues’ help and practice after work, they can gradually overcome the difficulties. The interns thought having internship in the hotel industry is not important to English majors, but it is a good opportunity for them to test job interest and adapt to the work environment beforehand.
As to improving the English department’s curriculum and internship program, the interns suggested that English department should give a placement test to freshmen, focus on train students’ English speaking and listening skills, encourage teachers of English department to use only English as the medium of instruction, include more courses such as hotel English or hotel Japanese and require English majors to reach 700 points on the TOEIC certificate as the graduation criteria.
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