Enhancing Authenticity in Composing Informative and Promotional Texts by Analysing Key Words in a Genre-based Writing Course

This study aims to examine the lexis used in the texts of tourism English. 78 Printed authentic tourist attraction brochures together with 24 ESP learners’ productions. A computerised package was used to generate the wordlists of the used lexis as well as the keywords. Besides, non-Chinese readers’ evaluation of the students’ writings was treated as the qualitative data. The analysis show that the students’ choices of the lexis differed to some extent from the authentic ones. The possible reasons stem from contextualised differences, students’ fossilisation of English learning, and their unilateral lexical knowledge. The results of this study pedagogically imply that key words need to be prioritized. It also argues that “the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter” (Twain, 2011). ESP teachers are advised to draw learners’ attention onto lexis choices and constraints to enhance the authenticity and trust of the information. Key words: genre-based writing instruction; tourist attraction brochures; key words analysis

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