Christine Price

Teacher of the Servicio de Lenguas Modernas, Universidad de Huelva

Using a small corpus and a systemic functional linguistics analysis to teach writing of hotel overviews to students of tourism.

This paper aims to describe how both a corpus and systemic functional linguistic analysis were used in the explicit teaching of a specific genre to ESP tourism students at the university of Huelva. The genre in question is the hotel overview. This choice was in consideration of several factors: the frequency with which the task appears in English for tourism textbooks; secondly, students were low-level English users hence a more complex genre was not appropriate, and finally existing overviews found of local hotels were sub-standard or non-existent, therefore, a real need was created for students to produce usable language for their future workplace. In the teaching/learning process the selection of a corpus supplied the teacher with what to teach and systemic functional linguistics with tools such as genre and register to analyse the selected texts. The paper describes how low-level English students became more successful writers able to produce relatively high-level texts through a three-phase teaching/learning cycle based on those promoted in Australian genre-based pedagogy. The paper concludes by discussing the problems encountered during the teaching unit with regards to raising students’ language awareness and coping with or even avoiding metalinguistic terminology.