Tourism around the world : a textbook project

There is an urgent necessity for good ESP textbooks. There are not too many around, and the few in existence appear very inadequate. Most of the time, ESL textbook writers feel that they should provide a basic framework and expect the classroom teacher to build lesson plans around it while adapting the material to suit the needs of a particular class. Writing a good textbook is a formidable and time consuming task. This creative project is a descrption of an ESP textbook. It sets out to provide a set of methodological guidelines and a number of teaching techniques to be used by the classroom teacher in dealing with a lesson. It discusses the four basic activities of language learning: listening, speaking, reading and writing and how to approach them as a way to stress oral and written communication in the target language. Communicative competence is taken to be the objective of language teaching: the preparation of speakers competent to communicate in the target language. Communicative competence includes not only the linguistic forms of a language, but also the knowledge of when, how and to whom it is appropriate to use these forms. With this premise in mind this work sets out to discuss how to teach dialogues, structural patterns, pronunciation, reading and writing, all basic components of a typical language lesson. To wrap up the project, a typical ESP lesson on Tourism is included. Its organization is consistent with the methodological guidelines discusses earlier, it uses the techniques discussed in the main body of the work and represents a sensible approach to language learning.Thesis (M.A.