English as a lingua franca in the Vietnamese hotel industry: Communicative strategies and their implications for vocational education

English has been used as a lingua franca of tourists and travellers worldwide. In the Vietnamese hotel context, comprehensible communication in English plays an important role in facilitating hotel business. The hotel staff communicate daily with guests from different linguacultural backgrounds. Yet, very little is known about how the Vietnamese hotel staff, particularly the reception staff, communicate with foreign guests in English. To address this lack, the current study examines the characteristics of English as a lingua franca spoken by the Vietnamese hotel Front Office staff when they interact with foreign guests. The study attempts to provide a contribution to the under-researched field of ESP in Vietnam and serve as a background for similar research in other fields and settings. One hundred and eighty-two naturally-occurring interactions were recorded in four hotels in three cities in southern Vietnam. Principles of conversation analysis were adopted for the study design and analysis which aimed to identify the communicative strategies that were most frequently employed by the Front Office staff to facilitate their communication with guests. By closely examining the interactions based on the next-turn proof procedure, key communicative strategies: repetition, reformulation, requests for clarification and confirmation, backchannels, minimal queries, lexical suggestion and the functions of these strategies emerged in the interactions were identified. There is a high demand for the competent use of English in the hospitality industry. The second part of the study explores whether the English courses in hospitality – the ESP courses – developed the macro skills that graduates needed in the workplace, particularly listening and speaking. Examination of the English textbooks and accompanying audio materials used in the hospitality courses revealed that the language skills developed through coursework and the language used in the real-life hotel setting are not fully aligned. In order to respond to the call from the Vietnamese Government, through the National Foreign Language Project 2020, for innovation in the teaching and learning of foreign languages, primarily English, the findings of this study will assist curriculum developers to adapt ESP courses to the authentic needs of students and the industry.