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Tour guide English and Translation: A Course Co-constructed by Students and a Multi-role Teacher
Jeng-yih Tim Hsu
Department of English
National Kaohsiung First University of Science & Technology
Abstract
This paper reports on a course of tour guide English and translation, offered to English majors in a college context in Taiwan. This ESP course, founded in the theoretical frameworks of task-based instruction (Richards & Rogers, 2001), translation theory, and tourism language (Powell, 2003), consisted of six elements (Graves, 1996, 2000; Tomlinson, 1998): designing syllabus, implementing the tourguide and translation course, guest speeches, three on-spot tours, course evaluation, and course re-organizing and re-planning. The paper provides detailed descriptions of the tasks involved in each stage during a 2-year period. Feedbacks and evaluation from both the administration, classroom teacher, and student participants who were trained to be potential English tour guides indicate that not only English fluency but other oral communication and presentation skills are needed on the student tour guides’ side. Such skills include pre-tour preparation, background knowledge, simultaneous interpretation, delivery of speech, question-answering skills, and tour guiding-specific etiquette. As for the teacher side, he played the roles of course designer, material presenter, co-learner, and model tour guide, working alongside to establish the course. As this was a trail course built upon theories and practices of English as a Foreign Language, translation, and speech presentation, this paper hopes to present a new direction which English, as a mean of communication and tour guiding, can be put into practices of a new type in an EFL setting (Richards, 2001) like Taiwan.
Keywords: task-based instruction, syllabus design, course evaluation, tour guide English
Reference:
Graves, K. (1996). Teachers as course developers. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Graves, K. (2000). Designing language courses: A guide for teachers. Boston,
MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Powell, M. (2003).Presenting in English. Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle.
Richards, J. (2001). Curriculum development in language teaching. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Richards J. C. & T. S. Rogers (2001). Approaches and methods in language teaching (2nd edition). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Tomlinson, B. (Ed.), (1998). Materials development in language teaching. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Author’s Bio data
Assistant Professor and Vice-chair
Department of English
National Kaohsiung First University of Science & Technology
Jeng-yih Tim Hsu received his Master in English Language/Linguistics from University of Arizona, and holds a doctorate in Composition & TESOL from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He is currently teaching at the Department of English, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His research interests include L2 phraseology, TESOL methods, business writing, course design.
contact asian_efl_journal@yahoo.com
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