English For Tourism, Intermediate Level

English For Tourism, Intermediate Level, is the second book in a
two-level course especially designed for learners of English as a Foreign language who study tourism and archeology as well as for those interested or working in these fields.

            English For Tourism is made up of ten thematically based units, each of which comprises two reading selections.  The first reading relates to tourism, and the second one relates to archeology. This text provides a fresh approach to the intermediate level. It is based on learning through meaningful motivating activities, relevant topics, critical thinking, active reading, speaking, and purposeful writing.

            English For Tourism is a comprehensive language course. It covers the language syllabus clearly and thoroughly, giving learners command over form together with extensive fluency practice. The units of the book are divided into a pre-reading orientation activity, an exercise on skimming or scanning,  a reading section, comprehension questions, a section on understanding reference, practice understanding signal words, exercises on guessing meaning from context, and a grammar focus section.  The material is also organized to provide constant recycling and expansion of knowledge about the language and its use.

            English For Tourism offers teachers and students several special features which make it an outstanding course book:

• A modern approach to the teaching of reading in terms of both
  content and skills.
• A wide variety of reading texts taken from authentic tourism and
  archeology curricula.
• All language elements (grammar, vocabulary, reading, speaking, and
  writing skills) developed simultaneously.
•   A wide variety of vocabulary development exercises to help
  students understand unfamiliar words and build their own  vocabulary
  bank.
•         Grammatical structures are introduced inductively and deductively,
  accompanied by contextualised practice material.
• A great variety of rhetorical styles and writing types.
• Students’ participation and involvement maximized through
  communicative language activities.
• Easy to use and teach with clear and straightforward tasks.

Description of the Course Material

Reading Skills

The reading material provides the students with a wide variety of topics from authentic tourism and archeology curricula. They are intended to trigger active class discussion, generating functional language while at the same time developing the students’ reading and cognitive skills. Each unit contains two reading selections that focus on important reading skills: getting the main idea, understanding reading structure, identifying paragraph topics, recognizing contextual reference, and making an outline as well as understanding signal words for cause and effect, comparison and contrast, chronological order, examples, classification, etc.

The course material offers students a variety of reading comprehension exercises to improve their comprehension and critical thinking. Each unit is introduced through a title page containing the title of the unit, a picture, and a few general questions which can be used in class discussions for topic anticipation and prediction. It also contains a set of comprehension questions varying from multiple choice to short answer questions, true or false exercises, or find the error exercises.

Vocabulary Skills

The wide variety of vocabulary development exercises is one of the special features of the course.

1. Guessing Meaning from Context: Students are encouraged to study and
   learn the vocabulary items explained in the vocabulary preview section and
   do the vocabulary exercises. They are also encouraged to understand the
   meaning of unfamiliar words and expressions by looking for context clues.
   Each unit includes an exercise on guessing meaning from context, which
   provides practice in context clues skills and highlights the unfamiliar
   vocabulary used in each unit.
2. Word Forms: This type of exercises helps students build their vocabulary
   by learning the functions of prefixes and suffixes as well as word form usage.
3. Synonyms and Antonyms: These are presented in varied formats and aim
   at developing students’ vocabulary.

Grammar Skills

In this section, grammatical structures are introduced deductively or inductively. In some units, grammatical rules are stated with correct examples of use; in other units, the students study a number of correct examples in order to work out the rules. Ample practice of specific grammatical points as well as holistic linguistic areas are provided in every unit.

Writing Skills

Throughout the course material, writing skills are given particular emphasis through recognition of patterns and techniques and production of various kinds of writing patterns. Practice includes  note-taking and outlining and putting words into meaningful sentences, writing accurate sentences. Writing activities are numerous; they range from phrases and short answer responses to complete sentences.

Speaking Skills

Speaking skills range from the discussion questions based on the title and the pictures at the beginning of each unit to answering certain exercises orally. In addition, each unit concludes with discussion questions that require students to talk about topics related to the reading.

Language skills and elements, however, are practised and used in an integrated manner – that is, to read, take notes, and speak; or to read, write, and speak, etc. Effort has been made to allow for sensible and natural communication in the classroom environment, as much as possible.