Chinese for Specific Purpose for Thai Guesthouse Staff Using Mentoring CoPs and Kano Model

Abstract

The guesthouse staffs have poor basic Chinese knowledge which causes delivery unclear information service to free independent travel (FIT) tourists. To meet the information communication needs of Chinese free independent travelers (FITs), the Chinese language performance ability of the guesthouse staffs in Thailand are in critical need of improvement as they relatively lack Chinese language ability to communicate with Chinese FIT customers. Regarding this, to bring up the guesthouse staffs’ Chinese language performance, this research proposes a conceptual framework integrating customer knowledge management (CKM), mentoring communities of practice (Mentoring CoPs), and after action review (AAR). And three linguistic theories namely language for specific purpose, language hierarchy of Noam Chomsky and second language acquisition, are carried out to construct and support the implementation of Mentoring CoPs. Objectives aim to i) Identify the specific problems that guesthouse staffs facing in terms of Chinese FITs. ii) Create Chinese for Specific Purpose lessons for Thai guesthouse staffs. iii) Evaluate the effectiveness of Chinese for Specific Purpose lessons. Samples in this research are two Thai staff of the Gord Chiang Mai Guesthouse who are responsible for the reception services.

Language for Specific Purpose is used to extract the active vocabulary and common sentences from the guesthouse service dialogues. Then, Mentoring CoPs is selected to establish a Chinese learning community and deliver Chinese for Specific Purpose lessons. AAR Self-reflection is performed in the end to find out the effectiveness of Chinese for Specific Purpose lessons as well as to track the guesthouse staffs’ Chinese language performance. The pre-test and post-test are used to evaluate the improvement of guesthouse staffs’ Chinese language performance. Besides, Chinese FIT customers are asked to fill in customer satisfaction questionnaire regarding to guesthouse staffs’ Chinese language performance in communication service. Research results illustrated that: i) Guesthouse staffs’ Chinese proficiency improved significantly after the implementation of Mentoring CoPs. A total score of 100, staff A and B got the same pre-test scores at 20 points while in the post-test, staff A and B got 95.67, and 94.33 respectively. ii) The staffs achieved a score of more than 75 (cognitive level-applying) in the post-test, indicating that they can apply the domain knowledge they have learned to solve communication problems in daily reception work; iii) Chinese FITs’ satisfaction with the Chinese language performance of guesthouse staffs increased, especially in terms of sentence integrity and pronunciation accuracy, from average 0.35 (out of 3 points) in December 2019 to 2.40 in February of the following year. Based on the recognition of the results and findings, Chinese Language for Specific Purpose lessons using Mentoring CoPs and Kano Model are feasible to improve the Chinese language performance of guesthouse staffs.