The Roles of Foreign Language in Business Administration

This paper explores the roles of foreign language in business administration, investigates managerial perspectives and studies the problems of foreign language usage in communication to discover modes of developing employee's foreign language ability and to investigate the students' opinions 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 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 differences between customers. The problems also come from both senders and receivers who lack knowledge of foreign languages. The informants stated that organizations should invite professional trainers to help improve foreign language skills in vocabulary and conversation in particular.