Products to train tourism professionals: a valuable source of ESP materials to raise genre awareness and achieve sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences

Undoubtedly, linguistic auditing, specialist informants, and in-company observation are the most reliable tools available to the ESP practitioner/researcher who aims at analysing the genres used in tourism professional settings in order to design tasks to supplement existing English for Tourism textbooks. This type of research is, however, not always possible. If the discourse community we should study, i.e. the actual professionals, is not at hand, why not trying its closest relatives: the trainers of tourism professionals? The purpose of this paper is to show that products (i.e. textbooks, multi-media courses, etc.) to train tourism professionals in English-speaking countries can be a valuable source of materials as they can serve a twofold purpose. On the one hand, they can help ESP teachers determine student’s needs for specific genres, and identify genre and discourse patterns. On the other hand, these training products -though obviously not addressed to linguistsoften describe the sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences students must acquire to successfully perform their jobs in specific professional settings. Therefore, the tasks we design will perfectly conform to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.