Abstract:
This study emanates from observations made during an initial survey we conducted in the restaurants of some hotels in Accra, Ghana. It was observed that waiters/waitresses encounter language barriers while attending to customers who speak only French. The linguistic barrier prevents them from serving these customers very well. The study therefore seeks to analyse the specific language needs of waiters/waitresses already working in restaurants in order to design a training programme in French solely for them as the existing training programmes are too general and target students in school. Using three data collection instruments (questionnaire, interview and non-participant observation), we collected data from 31 waiters and waitresses and three restaurant supervisors working in the restaurants of three hotels in Accra. The instruments were designed based on the framework for target situation analysis and learning needs analysis of Hutchinson and Waters (1987). The findings from the analysis present the waiters/waitresses in question as a group of Ghanaian adults who are professionals and have, on the average, completed Senior High School level. They have a high interest in learning French but do not have the time to take part in an in-person training programme. After identifying nine situations within which the waiters/waitresses communicate with their customers and the tasks they accomplish during those times, the specific needs of waiters/waitresses were analysed. A French training programme was then designed for them. We recommend that the training programme for waiters/waitresses should be implemented in a hybrid mode with most of the sessions online either synchronous or asynchronous.
