Teaching Foreign Languages for Tourism: Research and Practice

The aim of this book is to offer a broad picture of the current state of academic research on foreign language teaching for the tourism sector from different perspectives and cultural backgrounds. This multilingual volume includes sixteen essays written in four different languages - Spanish, German, French and English - of relevance for tourism. The articles offer different approaches and methods - most of them in applied linguistics - and constitute research studies as well as practical teaching proposals for different languages. The practical teaching proposals have been offered in training programmes for tourism studies at different European universities.
This volume will contribute to the foundation of a specific discipline which combines foreign language teaching and learning on the one hand and tourism on the other, its main trends and the skills it requires, and suggests fruitful directions for future research in this field.

Gloria Boschis Senior Lecturer in German Studies at the University of the Balearic Islands. She holds a PhD from the University of Bielefeld (Germany) with a thesis on educational politics in the teaching of German in Spain. Her research fields include German culture from Weimar’s Republic to 1945, the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the didactics of German, its acquisition and its teaching for tourism. Her most recent publications are Übungsgrammatik Deutsch für den Tourismus 1 and Training Deutsch im Tourismus, both published in 2011.
Torsten Schlak (+) studied German as a Foreign and Second Language at the University of Bielefeld and at the University of Bochum (Germany). He carried out further studies, teaching and research stays at the University of Hawai’i (USA), the University of Toronto (Canada) and the University of South Florida (USA). He was an assistant professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Ruhr-University Bochum and lecturer at the Faculty of Language and Culture at the Osaka University (Japan). From 2009 to 2012 he was professor at the Institute for Language and Communication at the Technische Universität Berlin. He was the author and editor of numerous international publications in the field of language acquisition research.