ABSTRACT
English for tourism (EfT) has unique qualities that set it apart from other areas of English for specific purposes. Tourists' desires fuel the industry as they develop imaginaries (and thus expectations and desires) about what they will find in other places, and then set out travelling to have those desires fulfilled. Inviting alternative imaginaries—the encoded desires of EfT students, tourism employees, and other resident stakeholders—to enter the discourse can check the power imbalance inherent in tourism in which tourism employees are held almost entirely accountable for successful communication in interactions and tourism students often have little agency in shaping EfT curriculum. Taking into account the imaginaries and language desires (Motha & Lin, 2014) of resident stakeholders when designing EfT instruction can act as a form of rights analysis (Benesch, 1999, 2001). The case studies presented in this chapter (in a workplace-based program for hotel and restaurant employees in Nicaragua and in a higher-education setting in a hotel management program in Jordan) illustrate how this may be done as well as the type of insights that can be gained by attending to EfT stakeholders' desires.
