What is ‘English for Tourism’?: An Updated ‘Grounded Review’ of the Literature

Abstract

This paper reports the results of a replication of an exploratory study conducted five years earlier that sought to answer the deceptively simple question: ‘What is English for Tourism?’. The original study created a corpus of 348 texts that served as a representative sample of all EfT literature available on Google Books and Google Scholar at the time, including both teaching material and academic literature. A qualitative analysis, which categorized and coded the corpus in accordance with grounded theory, revealed two categories of teaching material—those written for local markets and those written for international markets—as well as two parallel research traditions within this niche of applied linguistics: studies that aim to understand and inform the teaching and learning of English for tourism (EfT) and studies that seek to understand and explain the English of tourism (EoT). A quantitative analysis using Microsoft Excel and the free concordancer LancsBox confirmed and qualified these thematic categories via a comparative analysis of the EfT and EoT sub-corpora. The present study employed the same sampling frame to update the existing corpus with 543 texts published or made accessible online over the last five years. The same mixed-methods data analyses were performed on the expanded corpus. The results of the replication reconfirm the semantic, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological differences and interdependencies between EfT and EoT found during the first study. The results also reveal recent shifts in international and national discourses and expose further gaps in the existing body of literature.

Keywords

• english for tourism
• english of tourism
• english for specific purposes
• grounded theory
• corpus-based research
• literature review