The Roles of Foreign Language in Business Administration

Abstract

This paper explores the roles of foreign language in business administration, investigates the manager perspectives, studies the problems of foreign language usages in communication, to discover modes of developing employee’s foreign language ability, and to investigate the co-operative education students’ opinion concerning the roles of foreign languages in business administration in Thailand. In-depth, face-to-face qualitative interviews were employed. The results indicated that foreign languages play their significant roles in import and export companies. In the managers’ point of view, foreign languages are very important to their businesses, especially, for communication with customers, other companies, and suppliers. The problems in some companies might happen because of the differences of each customer. The problems also come from both senders and receivers who are lack of knowledge in foreign languages. The informants stated that organizations should invite professional trainers to help improve foreign language skills in vocabulary, conversation which are beneficial.