Corsi di Studio del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature straniere e Culture moderne

 

The main objectives of the course are to develop students’ critical approach to the information conveyed by tourism-related texts and to expand the participants’ array of language means used in specialised (tourism industry) communication. To this end, students will acquaint themselves with modern tools and methods in corpus linguistics, and will use the knowledge and skills acquired for linguistic analyses, terminology processing and the creation of lexicographic content.

 

 

 

Students will be able to conduct a linguistic analysis of tourism-related texts and discover the language means and communication strategies used for successful transfer of tourist information. Students will learn how to apply modern corpus linguistic tools and methods in textual studies and will develop their analytical and synthetic skills. Participants will learn how to use the existing, and how to create their own (do-it-yourself), textual repositories (specialised text corpora) for further research and practical use. Participants will also learn to identify and extract specific linguistic items (terms, multi-word expressions, collocations, etc.) for the purpose of critical text interpretation and lexicographic content creation. Special focus will be given to tourism-specific terminology, phraseology, syntax and rhetorical means  found in international tourism communication. Since students are expected to draft a written paper in academic English on the topics of the course, course participants will also hone their research skills.

 

 

 

Classes will take place in a computer lab to allow students to access a variety of online resources, including, in particular, tourism-related texts and a variety of corpus tools. Classes will be supported by PowerPoint slides and other textual and visual aids, which will later be made available to students on the course Moodle page. The course will consist of both presentation-type classes and workshops.

 

 

The final evaluation will be integrated with the result of the practical English test (1^st year lettorato magistrale: Summary writing).

The final grade will be calculated on the basis of partial grades acquired by students for specific activities and tasks assigned throughout the course. The details of the tasks/activities will be outlined during the course.

 

 

In the first part of the course the concept of corpus linguistics (CL) is introduced, and specific corpus methods and tools are presented and evaluated. Selected online programs are demonstrated and used for both the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the sample material, including tourism-related texts. Particular attention is given to the use of CL in lexical and terminological studies as well as practical undertakings, such as dictionary-making.  

In the second part of the course the knowledge and skills acquired in the first part of the course are put into practice. Do-it-yourself corpora composed of a range of tourism-related texts are studied from a variety of perspectives, the aim being, inter alia, to summarise their universal linguistic (incl. pragmatic) characteristics, extract an array of language means (incl. terminology) typical of the genre(s) and evaluate specific texts against the universals discovered. The course concludes in both individual and collaborative work that is expected to produce tangible effects in the form of bi- and multilingual tourist brochures, web pages, social media content, terminological databases as well as specialised glossaries. 

 

 

 

Francesconi, S. (2010) Reading Tourism Texts: A Multimodal Analysis. Bristol/ Buffalo/ Toronto: Channel View Publications.

Łukasik, M. (2014) Compiling a Corpus for Terminographic Purposes. Komunikacja Specjalistyczna, 7, 71-83.

Maci, S. (2007) Virtual Touring: The Web-Language of Tourism.  Linguistica e Filologia, 25, pp.41-65. 

Maci, S. (2010) The Language of Tourism. Bergamo: CELSB.

Maci, S. (2012) Tourism as a specialised discourse: The case of normative guidelines in the European Union. Token. A Journal of English Linguistics, No. 1, pp. 37-58.

Stubbs, M. (2004) Language corpora. In Davies A., Elder C. (eds.), The Handbook of Applied Linguistics, Malden-Oxford-Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 106-132.

 

(further references will be given at the beginning of the course)