English for Tourism: Using translated texts in the classroom to improve writing skills

The article reports on the preliminary results a project aimed at developing the writing skills of elementary and lower-intermediate learners of English for Tourism. Coursebooks for the global market include writing activities and resources, but they usually do not take into account the learners’ L1 and their natural tendency to resort to it in the language classroom. As a consequence, in spite of progress in grammatical and lexical accuracy, learners’ written production often remains largely influenced by their L1 syntax, vocabulary and rhetorical strategies. This may have a negative impact on their ability to communicate effectively in the professional domain. Translation has been successfully used with advanced learners of ESP to exploit this tendency to relate the L1 and L2 lingua-cultural systems. However, translating can be too challenging for low-proficiency learners. To overcome this difficulty and obtain the same benefits offered by translation tasks, learners were asked to work on two small comparable and parallel corpora of English and Italian guidebooks. The corpus-based, compare/contrast activities maintained a high level of interest in the learners and directed their attention towards the linguistic, stylistic and cultural features of the genre. Post-testing shows that this approach had a positive impact on both specialized and general proficiency in English.