The Creation of an Online Pre-employment English Listening Test for Hotel Front Office Staff
Therranuch Pattarakeatcharoen, Supalak Nakhornsri
King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok, Thailand
ABSTRACT
Generally, English proficiency is one of the important required qualifications for hotel front office staff. The tools used for the assessment of English proficiency in each hotel can vary. If the hotels do not have their own assessment tools, TOEIC is commonly used. However, TOEIC is designed for general international communication, not specifically for hotel jobs. A test tailored for this specific purpose is required. Regarding language skills, listening is very important for hotel staff because they are required to listen to guests’ needs which can affect guests’ satisfaction. Therefore, the purposes of this study were 1) to create the test specification for an online Pre-employment English Listening Test for Hotel Front Office Staff (PeETFOS), 2) to develop the online PeETFOS, 3) to evaluate the test’s quality and 4) to create ability bands for describing English listening levels. The study was conducted with 31 undergraduate students who studied in the Hotel and Lodging Business Management major. The front office task analysis was implemented by distributing an online open-ended questionnaire. The statistical procedures employed to analyze the data included 1) content analysis which was applied for task analysis, 2) validity, reliability, and item analysis which were implemented for the test quality and 3) the Angoff method used for creating the ability bands for describing English listening levels. The findings from the online open-ended questionnaire were reported according to the 4 language task characteristics aspects. The online PeETFOS can be divided into 7 tasks which comprised 5 multiplechoice items each, 35 test items in total. In addition, the ability bands for describing English listening levels were divided into 4 levels. Therefore, the online PeETFOS could be used as one of the important tools for selecting the right applicants for job positions.
KEYWORDS
English listening test, English for hotel, an online test, ability bands