Abstract
Siargao Island, one of the Philippines’ prime tourist destinations, has experienced a growing demand for effective communication between tourism workers and international visitors. As the global lingua franca, English plays a vital role in ensuring quality service delivery and meaningful cultural exchange in the tourism sector. This study employed a comparative quantitative research design to assess the English-speaking proficiency of tourism workers in Siargao Island and to explore its implications for English language teaching at the elementary level. Specifically, it examined the respondents’ demographic profiles and evaluated their proficiency in fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation. The study also investigated whether significant differences in proficiency exist across demographic groups. Findings revealed that tourism workers demonstrated an overall average level of English-speaking proficiency (M = 6.02, SD = 0.65). Among the subskills, pronunciation was rated highest (M = 6.44, SD = 0.67), followed by fluency and coherence (M = 6.18, SD = 0.73) and lexical resource (M = 5.96, SD = 0.70). Grammatical range and accuracy received the lowest rating (M = 5.49, SD = 0.71). These results suggest that while workers can generally communicate in English, limitations in grammar and vocabulary may hinder more complex interactions and lead to potential misunderstandings. A repeated-measures ANOVA confirmed significant differences among the assessed subskills (F = 94.19, p < .01), with all pairwise comparisons yielding statistically significant results (p < .01). Among demographic variables, only length of experience significantly affected fluency and coherence (p = .03); all other variables showed no significant influence (p > .05). Based on the study's findings, a learning material titled English for Young Explorers was created to assist elementary learners in developing foundational speaking skills aligned with real-world tourism contexts, to better prepare young learners for potential future roles in the tourism sector.
