THE LANGUAGE NEEDS ANALYSIS ON ENGLISH SPEAKING SKILL OF THE ADMISTRATIVE CLERKS IN A RAJABHAT UNIVERSITY IN BANGKOK

Abstract

            Administrative clerks play a crucial role as the main coordinators in organizations. Communicative skills, speaking in particularly, was crucial for their career. The purposes of the study were to explore communicative situations, in which English speaking was employed as part of their work performance, to investigate their English-speaking problems and needs for the skill improvement, and to determine the scope of topic for developing administrative clerks’ English speaking skill for administrative work. The sampling groups included administrative clerks working for deans in the faculties of Education in a Rajabhat Universities. The sampling group was purposively selected based on the their responsibilities of administrative clerks. The study tool included semi-structured in-depth interviews asking the sampling group about communicative situations, in which English speaking was employed, and English-speaking problems and needs for the skill improvement. The verbal accounts of the sampling group was compared for contrast and similarity of the data elicited from the sampling group. Using more than one data set assuring the validity of the research results, the study reported that there were communicative situations in which English speaking skill was in need for work accomplishment. Problems on pronunciation, structures at sentence level, as well as conversational exchange between two or more people was reported as language area that needed attention and improvement.