Pixel International Conferences

The purpose of this study is to identify key difficulties to developing competencies in French for specific purposes of students of Leisure and hospitality and tourism business in Ugandan universities. French is a language spoken in East Africa Community (EAC), a “neighborhood” language, a language of Trade and Tourism businesses. Cross border activities are very important within the EAC as well as with its neighboring countries. The development of these activities includes the ability to share one or several regional languages and the ability to speak one of the continental languages, a case in point of French. In addition, Tourism is an important sector which is capable of significantly contributing towards socio-economic transformation of the Ugandan economy. For instance, France is the fourth biggest tourism spender in the world, with some 1.6 million French nationals visiting Africa every year. However, only 15,000 of these choose Uganda as a destination, a small number, especially when compared to the United Kingdom's 60,000.It can be logically derived that such a disparity occurs as a result of language and cultural barriers. Yet given Uganda's geographical location next to Rwanda, Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo, there should be more French interest in the country. The key to realizing this potential lies in the development of local capacity to use French language in addition to English language and local languages in order to communicate, manage, interpret, and market the resources that are the foundation of sustainable tourism. Ugandan graduates who are products of Leisure and Hospitality and Tourism courses have to frequently deal with foreign tourists and this calls for the graduates to be proficient in the working languages to engage in effect communication. In the framework of the paper the author endeavors to analyze the hitches in French language skills in the Tourism graduates by identifying major challenges through exploratory research. Students of Leisure and Hospitality and Tourism of MUBS and Makerere University will constitute the population size. Random sampling method shall be used. Both questionnaires and interviews shall be used as data collection methods and key difficulties shall be determined through factor analysis.