With the increase in use of the internet and beginning of globalization, businesses use English website to communicate and share the information with consumers. Hotel is no exception. Since there is no limit to time and space for delivering and receiv... With the increase in use of the internet and beginning of globalization, businesses use English website to communicate and share the information with consumers. Hotel is no exception. Since there is no limit to time and space for delivering and receiving information in the online environment, the website users(customers) explore for information until they find the one that perfectly meets their needs, and purchase the either products or service based on the quality of information they receive. According to Kim and Hwang's study(2017), making customers satisfied by offering them the valued products or services will lead to a purchase, brand loyalty, and revisit intention. The hotel's English website, therefore, has a prime role to provide valuable contents to capture these types of users. The purposes of this study were to determine the basic vocabulary word lists used on the website, the differences in use of the terms between Native English and Non-Native English speakers, and the readability level of hotel websites. The specific aims of this study were to give basic knowledge of hotel vocabularies to the hotel website users and to improve the readability of these websites. In the study, fifty websites from Non-Native English countries and fifty websites from Native English countries (total of hundred websites) were collected, and these were segmented based on three categories: Native English speaking countries and Non-Native English speaking countries, level of accommodation using the 'Star Rating' system, and lastly, countries. Within hundred websites, twenty were from 5-Star rated hotel, twenty were from 4-Star rated, twenty were from 3-Star rated, twenty were from 1 or 2 Star rated, and last twenty were from no-Star rated hotel. Each hotel website was collected with six sub-categories: overview, rooms, dining, facilities and services, meetings, and location. In the first part of the study, the contents of the hotel websites were analyzed by Word List, Keyword List, Clusters, and N-Grams categories of Corpus software AntConc 3.4.4w. For the results of part one, a total of 76,327 tokens and 6,244 word types in non-native English countries' corpus and a total of 97,214 tokens with 7,176 word types in native English countries' corpus were extracted. Among these words "room", "hotel", "bed", "guest", "service" were on the lists of 10 most frequently used in both corpora; the results indicated that these words are the most important ones to know. Furthermore, by comparing the reference corpus and the target corpus, the keywords of corpora were calculated which identified the comparison in using words between the native and the non-native English counties. To convey the meaning of "free of charge", non-native speakers used word "free" more frequently than the word the native speakers used more, "complimentary". In the second part of the study, the readability assessment scheme for website was conducted using two different readability formulae: Flesch Reading Ease formula to calculate the readability scores for the text and Flesh-Kincaid Grade Level formula to measure the readability in grade level. Among hundred websites, the lowest Flesch Reading Ease score was 31.8 from the native English counties' Corpus, and the highest Flesch Reading Ease score was 81.4 from the non-native English countries' corpus. In addition, the lowest Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was the 4th grade level from the non-native English countries' corpus, and the highest Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level was the 14th grade level from the native English countries' corpus. Through this study, it was found that when the hotel class levels up, the score of readability decreases and this may not be very surprising that Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level increases. However, as previous researches suggested and the average level of education of adults in the U.S. is the 8th grade, the websites are, therefore, in need of revision to be more readable. While the research yielded meaningful results, there were some limitations in this study. First, the size of samples was very limited. A study that utilized a larger sample size of hotel websites from various countries would derive more accurate results and make a generalization of the findings. Second, while setting up the corpus of text, there were some words that were not able to make it copy and paste function. Researcher carefully typed out the words not to miss any parts; however, there is a possibility of error. ，韩语论文，韩语论文题目 |
