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endofthewor1d
Joined: 01 Apr 2003
Location: the end of the wor1d.
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 Posted: Sun May 14, 2006 8:17 pm Post subject: travel & tourism |
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does anyone know of any good textbooks for travel and tourism based english? the one i'm using right now is painfully boring. maybe i'm not using it to its full potential, but i'm really having a hard time keeping the students awake in my class, which is a pity because they're all really good students.
my general english classes are no problem, because we use 'firsthand success' which i like quite a bit.
i teach three hour block classes, which 'firsthand success' is particularly well-suited to. and that's fine for general english. but i need something equally good for my tourism majors.
my boss has told me that i'm welcome to suggest a different text, and i really don't want to miss out on the opportunity to do just that in time for next semester.
so if any of you are using a text that you really like, please let me know. thanks! |
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endofthewor1d
Joined: 01 Apr 2003
Location: the end of the wor1d.
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| Posted: Mon May 15, 2006 6:53 pm Post subject: |
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kimchikowboy
Joined: 24 Jan 2003
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| Posted: Mon May 15, 2006 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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OK, I'm in a hurry, but here are some thoughts from a paper I did on tourism texts, especially in Korea. If you want more info, or advice, PM me.
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Teaching tourism English, and especially teaching tourism English to Korean students, is an area with a lot of room to do research. While a trip to the Kyobo bookstore in Daegu can yield a large stack of tourism English textbooks, not much information exists on special problems inherent in the tourism English classroom. Walker (1995) and Garcia Laborda (2002) have both researched problems in teaching tourism English to students in Spain. Walker points out that many to the texts available follow �a predominantly functional approach� and are, in essence, �a specialized foreign language phrase book.� While students can pick up certain expressions, most of these expressions are for lower level-positions and are not sufficient to train students to use the language properly for the managerial positions most probably hope to get someday. Walker proposes a �topic-based focus� in order to provide a structure within which students can develop their English skills, while Garcia Laborda found that Spanish tourism students preferred, among other things, both language and tourism-specific lessons, class separation based on language ability and smaller classes.
From personal experience, I would say that the majority of tourism English texts produced in Korea are lacking. When doing research on available texts before beginning writing my own book, I found that the majority of texts designed in country for use by university students were merely collections of dialogs. I suspect that students are forced to memorize dialogs in class, but when the time came for use on the job, I can imagine that a tourism professional would be hard-pressed to recall the necessary words to deal with a situation involving meaningful communication with a foreigner. There seems to be little opportunity to practice real communication using these books, and many of the situations and much of the vocabulary seems both unnatural and of little use to day-to-day interactions in a tourism setting.
Another observance is that some of the tourism texts that have authorship credited to Korean professionals have been copied from texts published by foreign companies. I have seen pages in books published in Korea that were identical to those published elsewhere, right down to the drawings which accompanied the exercises and the fonts used in the original.
A final problem is that some of the locally produced books contain a lot of errors. One that was particularly amusing was the misspelling of the name of the soft drink �Coke� as �cock� (a slang term for �*beep*�). The thought of a male Korean Airlines flight attendant asking passengers, �Would you like some cock� because of a textbook mistake should produce a cringe in tourism promotion officials throughout the country. |
Before writing my own text, I used a general conversation book (Interchange), and additional good for grammar reinforcement (Basic English in Use) and photocopies from different tourism texts to highlight the things we were working on in a tourism context.
Good luck. |
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