Chinese conversation lessons via web-based application: A pilot study of hotel front office staff

Abstract

Phuket Island is one of the top tourist destinations in Thailand, with Chinese tourists as the biggest customers. Despite the fact that the province receives a great number of Chinese visitors all year round, it does not have enough human resources with adequate Chinese language skills. A needs survey of hotel staff found a high demand for learning Chinese, particularly Chinese language that was useful in the context of improving service levels in their everyday work. It was also found that many of these staff had both time and budget constraints. To solve these problems, a pilot project developed a web-based language learning application namely; https://www.chinyhotels.com. The aims of this project were to design Chinese conversation lessons for hotel front office staff via a web-based application and, to investigate the effectiveness of such lessons from learners’ perspectives. The cohort was 26 hotel front desk staff. A number of participants were selected from three hotels using convenience sampling. None of the participants had previously enrolled in Chinese language classes. A pre-test and a post-test were conducted to measure language progress after their one-month of practice. Post-test scores were higher and more statistically significant than pre-test scores with p<0.05. In addition, results of the project evaluation by the participants showed a high level of satisfaction with self-study using the web-based application. The success of this project suggests further development on a bigger scale.