It can be suggested that to survive in today’s international and intercultural communication, Thai students, especially those who have to interact with foreigners as do the students majoring in tourism industry, should be intensively taught both linguistics and pragmatics in the classroom settings.
7. Recommendations for further research
In order to study other dimensions of pragmatics, the following recommendations should be taken into the consideration.
1). The present research focused on offering help, addressing people, and responding to compliments, further research, thus, should be carried out to investigate tourism industry students’ pragmatic competence in other aspects of speech acts frequently used in the hotel and tourism service , such as greeting, requesting and thanking.
2). Future investigation should focus on factors possibly affect learners’ pragmatic competence and English proficiency, such as teaching materials, teaching methodology and teacher’s background knowledge of pragmatics.
3). A replicate study with larger sample-group, should be conducted.