Navigating Teachers’ and Tourism students’ Preferred Intelligence Types in English for Tourism Purposes

This study sought to navigate multiple intelligence (MI) theory in the First Friend Series with the tourism English courses. To comply with the objective, 15 teachers were asked to uncover their perceptions of MI theory and its application in their classes. The secondary aim of this study was to probe tourism learners’ preferred intelligence types concerning different kinds of intelligence provided in the textbooks. To do this, 42 tourism students were asked to fill out the MI inventory developed by Christison (1996). The findings indicated that the textbook series dominantly represented verbal/linguistic and special/visual linguistic intelligence types. In addition, the most preferred intelligence types were interpersonal, logical-mathematical, musical, and special-visual, respectively. However, the least intelligence types were naturalistic and bodily-kinesthetic. The findings revealed that female learners displayed higher mean rank in answering the MI inventory, but the difference between the male and female learners in their MI type was not significant. Categorizing data obtained from teachers’ interviews (N= 15) showed that MI brings positive outcomes related to teaching practices and the learners’ learning. Teachers reported positive attitudes towards considering MI theory in teaching and applying it in their classes. The findings have implications for the tourism students, English for specific courses, and language policy makers.