Learning English on the Job: Workplace Interaction and Communicative Development among Indonesian Local Tour Guides

Lailatul Istikomah (Universitas PGRI Kanjuruhan Malang)
Umiati Jawas (Universitas PGRI Kanjuruhan Malang, Indonesia)
Lasim Muzammil (Universitas PGRI Kanjuruhan Malang, Indonesia)

Voices of English Language Education Society
Vol 10 No 2 (2026): August 2026

English communication is essential for local tour guides, yet limited attention has been given to how guides with little formal language education develop communicative competence through everyday tourism work. This qualitative case study explored how local tour guides at Tumpak Sewu Waterfall, East Java, acquired and used English through natural interaction, the communication challenges they encountered, and the contribution of workplace experience to their communicative development. Twenty guides with diverse educational backgrounds and one to four years of guiding experience were selected through criterion-based purposive sampling. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and non-participant observations of authentic guiding activities and analyzed using recursive thematic analysis. The findings revealed three interconnected patterns. First, formal education generally provided only an initial linguistic foundation, whereas practical English developed through repeated interaction with international tourists, self-directed media use, personal vocabulary notes, peer practice, and the reuse of expressions encountered at work. Second, participants’ principal difficulties concerned unfamiliar accents, rapid speech, and real-time comprehension rather than vocabulary alone. They managed these difficulties by requesting repetition, inferring meaning from context, adjusting speech, using gestures, and, when necessary, consulting translation applications. Third, sustained workplace interaction strengthened tourism-related vocabulary, fluency, confidence, sociolinguistic adaptability, and strategic competence. More experienced guides tended to rely less on translation technology and more on clarification, contextual interpretation, and interactional repair. These findings position the tourism workplace as an experiential language-learning environment in which communicative competence develops through the interaction of authentic exposure, reflection, self-directed learning, and repeated practice.