Teaching Foreign Languages for Tourism ― Research and Practice

Teaching foreign languages as a tourism activity has its differences from academic teaching; the time allotted is compressed, for one, and the student has reduced expectations. In addition, content is very specific as to function and geography. The trick here is to get the student prepared for a multiplicity of very specific language and cultural experiences. Presented in their original English, German, Spanish and French, these sixteen articles address the current state of the balances of this fine art of teaching foreign languages in the field of tourism. Topics include assessing language needs, exploring the English language landscape, special; considerations for limited language learning, assessment of English through Web 2.0, using cultural words to increase competence, special considerations to use mini-guides to European destinations, tourism as a key factor in local development, German in tourist literature, the adaptive culture of museums, virtual language domains, specific languages for specific destinations, professional contexts, and analyzing what you need to be able to teach before, during and after you teach it. The essays, as a general rule, concentrate on content rather than delivery. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Gloria Bosch is Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands. She holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld (Germany) with a thesis on educational politics in the teaching of German in Spain. Her research fields include German culture from Weimar’s Republic to 1945, the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the didactics of German, its acquisition and its teaching for tourism. Her most recent publications are Ubungsgrammatik Deutsch fur den Tourismus 1 and Training Deutsch im Tourismus, both published in 2011.
Torsten Schlak (?) studied German as a Foreign and Second Language at the University of Bielefeld and at the University of Bochum (Germany). He carried out further studies, teaching and research stays at the University of Hawai’i (USA), the University of Toronto (Canada) and the University of South Florida (USA). He was an assistant professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Ruhr-University Bochum and lecturer at the Faculty of Language and Culture at the Osaka University (Japan). From 2009 to 2012 he was professor at the Institute for Language and Communication at the Technische Universitat Berlin. He was the author and editor of numerous international publications in the field of language acquisition research.