A Corpus-Based Approach to Learning a Tour Guide Talk

Abstract

Due to the fact that few studies have been conducted on learning and teaching English for tourism on the basis of corpus-based approach, this paper reports on an empirical case study conducted to investigate the integration of corpus-based approach into learning a tour guide talk in English. With this aim, 70 students who had already taken a course of English for tourism in the previous semester were selected as subjects. They were initially prepared to be familiar with the program before experiencing a corpus-based learning on tour guide talk. Then, they were tested and asked to respond to questionnaires designed to know their attitudes towards corpusbased approach to learning English for giving tour guide speech. Results show that students seem to feel positively motivated towards corpus-based learning, specifically by the fact of having direct access to real tourguide-speech samples. Also, they do find frequency, collocation, and language patterns of guiding speech interesting and fruitful for application. Additionally, students acknowledge the potential of corpus-based approach as a powerful tool to generate independent learning and developing strategies for giving tour guide speech. It is hoped that the research would call for a changing role of language teacher as the results suggest a need for a move from a traditional lecturer to active-learner generator.