A GRAND TOUR - Investigations into the Self-compiled Tourism English Corpus and its Potentials in Teaching the Vocabulary and Discourse of Tourism

Abstract

The aim of the dissertation is to extend research on the application of self-compiled corpora in teaching the special language of tourism. As previous studies focussing on tourism students’ vocabulary development with corpus methods and techniques are based on tourism corpora that are publicly not available, I examined the potentials of developing a specialized corpus, and compiling word and collocation lists that can be utilized in teaching English for tourism. The main aim of this study is to present in what ways a relatively small self-built corpus of tourism texts can be exploited to enhance learners’ lexicon, and to develop their collocational awareness. In order to provide basis for the investigations on the compilation of word and collocation lists, on the structural and functional types of lexical bundles, on the semantic preferences of collocations, and on the persuasive discursive features of tourism language the so-called Tourism English Corpus (TEC) was compiled. The corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses focussed on frequent lexical items and multiword units of the tourism texts and on their collocational behaviour. The lexico-grammatical patterns were examined at lexical, syntactic and discursive levels, and scrutinized in terms of their grammatical structures and discourse functions. The investigations of tourism lexis were based on the notions of word family, lexical bundles and collocations, and yielded thematic word lists of the main domains of tourism, as well as collocation lists of the most frequently occurring verbs, nouns and adjectives in the corpus. The analysis of text coverage revealed that the lexis of the TEC texts is not highly technical, the majority of the lexical items of the word lists fall in the categories that are considered sub-technical and general vocabulary. The corpus-based analysis of persuasive discursive techniques in travel articles shed light on several specific features of the marketing-oriented tourism discourse, and presented some ways how lexico-grammatical choices as inherent persuasive devices affect the prospective customers’ perception and decision making. The findings of the studies offer a novel contribution to different fields of research; they provide a deeper insight into the lexico-grammatical patterns and discursive features of the language of tourism, and present several methodological aspects of the compilation of a specialized corpus, word- and collocation lists, and their implementation in teaching the specialized vocabulary and language of tourism. They also provide a clearer understanding of tourism discourse, serving a basis for material and course design.