ABSTRACT
Although English for tourism (EfT) is an acknowledged branch of English for specific purposes (ESP) in both research and pedagogy, a clear definition of EfT and a clear methodological framework for EfT research is lacking in the literature. This chapter reports the results of an exploratory study that sought to answer the deceptively simple question: What is English for tourism? First, a representative sample of all EfT literature available on Google Books and Google Scholar was categorized in accordance with grounded theory. The preliminary results revealed two categories of teaching material—those produced for local markets and those produced for international markets—as well as two interdependent but distinguishable research perspectives in the academic discourse—the study of teaching English for tourism and the study of the English of tourism. This categorization was further qualified and quantified with the aid of corpus-informed methods, that is, by creating and comparatively analyzing a subcorpus of EfT texts and a subcorpus of EoT texts. The results offer insights into the semantic, conceptual, theoretical, and methodological differences between EfT and EoT, from which a working model of EfT research and practice, as well as particular gaps in the existing body of research, begin to emerge.
