A Needs Analysis for Designing an English Syllabus for Tourism

The present work aims at investigating the needs of second year licence tourism students at the National Superior School of Tourism (NSST) in order to design adequate English for Tourism Purposes (ETP) syllabus to learn the English language appropriate to their field of interest. A careful review of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and needs analysis literature showed that ESP courses strive for authenticity, adequacy and relevance. The study is based on analyzing the tourism students’ needs, requirements, and preferences, a crucial stage in designing ESP courses, in order to offer them an adequate syllabus that promotes quality tourism English learning. In a further scope, the goal is to help students handle specific situations in the future real life contexts having had good command of linguistic and communicative competencies. The research has been located in a mixed-methods approach triangulating different data collection and analysis tools.