A Course Book for EFL Cosmetology Students

Eunjee Ko (International Graduate School of English, Seoul) in Lecture Theatre 1

at The MATSDA/University of Liverpool Conference: Authenticity and Materials Development for Language Learning

There are four major reasons why it is urgent to develop a course book for EFL cosmetology students in Korea: 1) 1,451,257 foreign residents in Korea 2) the popularity of Korean beauty products 3) the enactment of regulations for beauty business promotion in 2010. To develop the course book, a needs analysis, an existing materials analysis and a review of literature were done to answer the following two research questions: 1) What are the critical elements that the course book should include to correspond to the learner’s wants, lacks, and necessities? 2) What are the cultural factors that cause miscommunication between Korean professional beauticians and English speaking customers in salons? The result showed that both students and language instructors think listening and speaking are essential to working with foreign customers and they should enhance vocabulary. In addition, cultural factors that need to be taught were decided by the result of interviews with 58 foreign residents in Korea, such as different concept of personal space and asking too many personal questions. After taking all these considerations into account, a course book was developed and piloted and a survey was conducted to see if learning motivation had increased. I will be presenting the results of this survey.