Abstract
Abstract Teaching English for Tourism at university involves both developing specialized language skills and forming knowledgeable professionals capable of appropriate intercultural communication. The distinctive feature of most instances of tourism discourse is the fact that it draws from a range of specialized domains. It mediates the tourist experience and contributes to closing the gap between the home- and the destination’s culture by making culture-specific knowledge and specialized concepts accessible to non-specialists. The article discusses the instructional effects of authentic multimodal materials within task-based project-work carried out with learners at the University of Pisa. The focus is specifically on the communicative strategies used to make specialized terminology or concepts easily understandable for the hearer. This study reports on a multimodal analysis of two sets of videoclips created by the students before and after dedicated instruction based on authentic English L1 clips from documentaries, “docu-tours” and guided tours. It discusses the positive changes observed in the learners’ use of popularization strategies to create conceptual accessibility.
Highlights
Teaching English for Tourism (EfT) at the university level necessarily involves developing both specialized lexico-grammatical skills and forming knowledgeable professionals capable of appropriate and effective intercultural communication
The distinctive feature of most instances of tourism discourse is the fact that it draws from a range of specialized domains
This study reports on a multimodal analysis of two sets of videoclips created by the students before and after dedicated instruction based on authentic English L1 clips from documentaries, “docu-tours” and guided tours
Summary
Teaching English for Tourism (EfT) at the university level necessarily involves developing both specialized lexico-grammatical skills and forming knowledgeable professionals capable of appropriate and effective intercultural communication. The learners’ progress is discussed in terms of the ability to use different resources to this end through a qualitative analysis of the two sets of videos We compare their strategies to those used in authentic L1 docu-tours (Bonsignori and Cappelli 2020) and draw some conclusions as to the potential of multimodal EfT pedagogy for both linguistic and professional development. In guided tours, documentaries and docutours, non-verbal cues such as hand gestures, gaze direction, body posture, sounds, and images, greatly contribute to supporting, integrating, and creating meaning when specialized or culture-specific concepts are involved, in different ways in each genre (cf Cappelli and Masi 2019; Bonsignori and Cappelli 2020). This is probably due to the fact that, contrary to what happens in documentaries, the verbal component precedes the visual component (Lopriore 2015), and docu-tours preserve some of the characteristics of the more spontaneous nature of guided tours
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