Exploring Tourists' Reported Perceptions of Students' English Speaking in Tour-Guiding at Prambanan Temple

Abstract

English for Specific Purposes (ESP) in education is often justified by its relevance to the real communicative demands of future work, in which it is ultimately the tourist  not a teacher or a test  who judges whether a student's English is adequate. This study explores international tourists' reported perceptions of student tour guides' English speaking immediately after guided explanations at Prambanan Temple, collected as part of an internship in the Implementation of ESP for Tourism course. The research addresses how tourists evaluate students' speaking and explanation in their own words, aiming to describe recurring patterns in these perceptions rather than to measure students' speaking performance directly. Using a qualitative descriptive design, eleven short verbal responses were elicited from international tourists through a standard post-tour question, video-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Eight evaluative categories emerged, most frequently referencing clarity and comprehensibility, with smaller numbers of responses referencing interactional competence, politeness, interest, perceived knowledge, contribution to visit enjoyment, and one explicit critique of scripted-sounding delivery. Within this small, single-site convenience sample, tourists' reported perceptions more often referenced comprehensibility than grammatical accuracy, though this pattern should be read as suggestive of tourists' impressions rather than as a measure of students' actual speaking competence. The findings suggest that tourists judge student tour guides' English primarily by how clear and comprehensible their explanations are, with interactional competence, politeness, and perceived knowledge serving as secondary considerations, while explicit grammatical accuracy was rarely mentioned as an evaluative criterion. Based on these findings, the study recommends that ESP instruction for tourism explicitly emphasize intelligibility and interactional competence alongside grammatical accuracy, and incorporate practiced question-and-answer routines to help future guides deliver explanations that sound natural rather than scripted. These tentative implications are offered alongside key limitations, including the small convenience sample, single site, brief elicited responses, unequal exposure across guides, and possible courtesy bias.