Academic english for tourism, travel and hospitality

This is a collection of authentic or adapted materials intended to expose students and professionals in the Tourism industry to reading texts related to their field. Some of the extracts used in the present coursebook may not correspond to their original sources as their content has been severely manipulated, adjusted and/or condensed to serve the specific terminological needs of the units. These original sources have been merely used as points of inspiration to create texts that combine richness of vocabulary and authenticity of content and style. The objective is to enhance the student’s reading skills and strategies and to enrich their topic- related vocabulary. Each lesson consists of some theoretical information on reading skills, pre-reading activities, reading comprehension exercises, cloze texts, and terminology exercises. The pre-reading activities aim at equipping the reader with the necessary skills to read more effectively, act as a lead-in and sensitize the reader to the content area while at the same time develop their speaking skills. The texts themselves as well as the reading comprehension activities familiarize students with academic reading, promote reading skills and help acquire confidence in dealing with authentic or semi-authentic materials of the type to be encountered in real life professional situations. They also enable learners to cope with the language demands of any postgraduate course in related fields and develop their critical thinking. The vocabulary exercises actively engage learners in deducing the meaning of unknown, more uncommon words. The cloze exercises offer more practice in the mechanisms of the language while the Terminology activities enrich their academic and business vocabulary. The writing tasks at the end of some chapters act as a free production stage activity where students, using their prior knowledge, can produce an advanced- level written discourse. Furthermore, the dialogues provided aim at presenting authentic-like situations likely to be encountered in the work environment and further improve oral skills. The book by no means claims to extensively cover every area of the anyway broad spectrum of Tourism Studies and the relevant terminology. It is merely a collection of representative terms and materials. The main objective has been to expose anyone interested in Tourism to a variety of topics and teach them techniques of coping with language difficulties, which will hopefully prove valuable in their profession.