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[Non Sequitur]

From time to time I�ve been asked or expected to bias my Oral English towards the majors of my students. So over the years, I�ve had �English for Tourism Majors�, �English for Hotel Management Majors� and �English for IT Technicians�.
To be honest, most of the students had a hard job stringing 2 or 3 words of English together, so we were a long way from zeroing in on speaking about their major subject.
I also feel that there is no such thing as for example �Tourism English�. The tourism or hotel management bit is just additional specialised vocab.
Be interested in others� experience of this � particularly additional majors that may have been experienced i.e. medicine, animal husbandry etc.
In no instance was the class text oriented towards the major. They were the bog standard Chinese textbooks.
In one instance I wrote a few dialogues of my own that used tourism situations. As expected the school balked at photocopying enough for a class set.

[johntpartee]

You've cracked the code!! No matter what vainglorious names they give the classes (Western Culture, Tourism, etc.) it's all going to be basic oral English.

[Non Sequitur]

Johntp
Yep deja vu all over again.
I would mind attempting it if only they would give me a course book or commission some realistic dialogues that cast 2 or 3 students in a realistic travel agent situation.
See what others have to say.
Best
NS

[choudoufu]

i feel your pain! here at our little software college, we have three engrish
majors in the foreign language department: tourism english, business
english, hotel english. students mostly have very poorly english, achieving
250 or below on the gaokao. programs offer two years of instruction
followed by one year of internship.

when i started here, classes were segregated by major, and were not
streamed. chinglish textbook content was at junior level (for western
universities). textbooks were chosen not by the actual content, but by
the index page available online from the publishers.

admin is actually pretty reasonable about things. i've convinced them that
there be no such animals as 'tourism english' or 'hotel english.' we are now
combining the freshman classes, separating them in the second year for
their vocational english. next year we plan to begin testing the freshmen
and grouping them by level. they don't seem to mind when i bump
students up/down a year.

they have agreed to combine the tourism and business writing classes.
i get to throw out the textbooks, select new texts, or simply use my own
materials. there are now quite a few textbooks geared specifically for
tourism and hotel management. unfortunately, these books are often
written by chinese teachers with no experience in these fields, who simply
need to publish something in order to earn their masters.

[Non Sequitur]

Thanks Choudf
Are the books you mention oral English in a tourism or hotel management context or content textbooks. I mean hotel accounting or tourism technical stuff, such as airline groups - Star Alliance/One World?
I take it from the intro to your post that you do not have access to dialogues that put students in hotel or tourism settings.
Great though that your school is letting you reorganise things along the lines you mention.
Maybe they will commission you to write a few dialogues

[choudoufu]

[choudoufu]

[Non Sequitur]

I had a part time editing job at Dalian U of Tech Press.
This was yonks ago, but it was a sizable operation.
When I asked about their market I was told 'vocational colleges' as full blown unis like foreign (US) texts.

[Non Sequitur]

[Babala]

What I do is to search Amazon for books relating to the topics I need and then I go to Taobao to see if they have it. I'm amazed at the selection of books on Taobao. I have been able to find almost all the books from Amazon there at a cheaper price.

[Non Sequitur]

' the series has books 1 and 2
with general oral english before branching into the two vocational books.'

Thanks Choudf
I still have had to do Oral English with the content (tourism etc) being the preserve of Chinese teachers.
The request has been to not teach general oral English in my freshman classes, but to get students speaking 'tourist speak' from the get go.
The book scenario you outline suggests that the book authors also see the task as general Oral English with the 'tourism' aspect coming in via the special vocab that they pick up.
I did see on the website 'English for Airline Crew' so that's another one to add to the list.
Best

[fat_chris]

[Denim-Maniac]

[Non Sequitur]

From a marketing viewpoint the industry wants to differentiate the product.
That's why vitamin pill manufacturers have a 'Men's Multi' and other subdivisions of pretty much the same formulas.
What I'm getting from the comments so far, is that the Chinese schools we work for want to sell a course of 'Tourism English' but they are not prepared to resource it by way of texts.
'Show me the text' should be the response of any FT asked to do an ESP class of Oral English. This applies to freshmen in particular for whom any Oral English is a bit of a hurdle.

[Denim-Maniac]