| The growing development of tourism industry from home and abroad has made a higher requirement for tourism English majors than before. As for a tourism vocational school, the educational objective is to train the students to be fully-developed in the aspects of professional knowledge, professional skills, professional ethics and, equally important, the good application of language. English plays an increasingly important role in the tourism activities. As a result, many linguists begin to lay their eyes on the study of a special professional language——the tourism English. However, present studies mainly focus on the tourism English from theoretical perspectives of translation, style, pragmatics, cross-culture, systematic-functional linguistics or cognitive linguistics. This paper tries to focus on the studiers who receive professional education of tourism. It aims at investigating their spoken English proficiency by means of Error Analysis in order to put forward some constructive suggestions to tourism English majors.In the present study, the author studies the errors of spoken English made by students majoring in tourism English by means of Error Analysis (EA). In our research, with Error Analysis (EA) as the guidance, the author has chosen 30 students from three tourism English classes through the approach of stratified random sampling. They have been organized to take part in a test of spoken English with the topic concerning tourism practice. After recording their oral performance, the author has transcribed it into written form word for word in order to analyze it carefully. From the analysis of data strictly according to the five procedures of EA, the students'errors have been marked and classified into two major types. They are linguistic errors and pragmatic errors. Linguistic errors are also further classified into many sub-branches. The results of the analysis offer us the evidence that abundant errors of various kinds exist in students'oral English. The findings of the present research are as follows:(1) The rate of students'errors accounts to as high as 99.15% which is very serious and unsatisfactory. Among lexical errors, morphological errors and syntactical errors, syntactical errors are the most distinctive.(2) As far as syntactical errors are concerned, errors in tense rank the highest. Next to it is phrase misselection.(3) With regard to lexical errors, the confusion of sense relation ranks the first. Next one is formal misformation or coinage.(4) After applying t-Test of SPSS software, the results show that errors made by advanced students in spoken English significantly distinguish those of weak students. Then t-Test has been run on different levels of linguistic errors. The results also indicate that to improve one's spoken English, students need to consolidate linguistic knowledge in an all-round way.(5) The errors in spoken English can be traced to the following three main sources: interlingual transfer, intralingual interference and communicative strategies. Interlingual transfer includes L1 language transfer and cultural transfer. Intralingual interference falls into two sub-categories: overgeneralization and oversimplification.Finally, based on the research work, we present some pedagogical implications in spoken English in foreign language teaching (FLT) for Tourism English majors. Last but not least, the author uncovers some limitations of the research for further exploration and study in this regard.
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