African Journal of Hospitality, Tourism and Leisure (Aug 2019)
Enhancing Tourism graduate employability with English for Occupational Purposes: South African academic and industry perspectives.
Abstract
The concept of graduate employability is crucial in higher education; therefore, enhancing it is a key responsibility of all higher education institutions (HEIs) world-wide, and also in South Africa. English is universally considered a language of commerce, if not the language of commerce, and, thus, it very often forms part of a skills set required for employability in industry. English for Occupational Purposes (EOP), as part of curricula at HEIs, is especially imperative in the tourism industry, since this is a global service industry. In the process of developing curricula to prepare employable tourism graduates, the EOP wants and needs of both academics and industry practitioners should be taken into account, since these stakeholders often have differing perspectives. The focus of this paper, based on findings of a case study conducted at a South African university of technology is on the EOP wants and needs in the tourism industry, as perceived by the stakeholders. The study employed a focus group (six lecturers; three each from the Departments of Tourism Management, and Applied Languages), and individual semi-structured interviews (Heads of Department of both Tourism Management and Applied Languages; one Tourism Management Advisory Board member, and an alumna of Tourism Management, i.e., ten participants, in all), as methods for the qualitative data presented. The main conclusions drawn were that both the academic and industry stakeholders sampled regarded EOP as essential in the training of employable tourism graduates. They underlined EOP wants and needs specific to tourism, which would likely serve to enhance employability in the industry, including, specifically, extending the teaching of EOP beyond the current one year time allocated to this critical offering.
