Improving your pronunciation?

On of my Department colleagues, and also English for Tourism teachers, has just published a book that may help you to improve your English pronunciation. Te book is called "Teach yourself English Pronunciation" and it can be bought online. It includes a CD that can be displayed in your computer full of recordings and interactive explanations and practice.

A bit rusty...

Feeling a bit rusty?

Start having a look at some tourism magazines, for instance, and then write a review for this blog.

http://www.tourism-review.com/magazine.php

http://www.bviwelcome.com/

http://www.nmmagazine.com/

http://traveler.nationalgeographic.com/

You can also write about your proyects for your Tourim studies this year, about your holidays this last summer, the chespest flight, the best/ worst experience, etc.

Any topic will do as long as you drop us a line.

Remember: practice makes perfect.

Magazines for passengers

Would you like to read some English magazines? Free magazines?

These are the ones for passengers travelling with Easyjet, Ryanair, and several other airlines.

You can also find previous numbers.

Have a nice reading!

http://www.ink-live.com/

Do you want to know more about the IFEMA Arab version?

Yes, it could be something similar to our IFEMA. Have a look at its website and try to comment here all the differences and similarities with the Spanish one.

http://www.arabiantravelmarket.com/

What do you think?

Improving your listening by podcasting

A very good way to practice your English listening could be podcasting. The web is now full of this very good audio invention for ESL learners. Why? It is a cheap and efficient way to listen to fresh content based English. You can listen to all these audio recording either in the way or by copying them all to your mp3/ipodcasting player in order to hear them while in the underground or by car in your way to work. The quality of sound is great in most cases and you could find them in many different accents, which is very recommended for you are tourism professionals to be in a very close future.

Here you are some suggestions for you to listen:

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Travel (very practical in order to study unit 5, you will see why)

Open University ITunesU (You need to have Itunes software installed)

University of Oxford ITunes (Arts and Humanities)

Tourism, Travel, Geography and Education Podcasts (A very complete compilation of podcasts dealing different fields of tourism, including airplane topics, new destinies, travelling guides, etc.)

Idiotvox-tourism (assorted podcasts dealing with tourism fields, very focussed on education)

Let's talk tourism podcast (Dublin Institute of Technology. Good to revise topics dealing with unit 1)

You will find some of these and others in the right section of this blog.

More suggestions? Opinions about this post? Do you agree with this? Please, use comments to reply.

meals

jajajaj

Could the crisis affect Spanish tourism?

Crisis, crisis, crisis.... is all you can read and listen these days in the news, the streets, the market... But, what about tourism? What about our tourism? Do you think there will be a crisis also in Spanish tourism? Do you think there could be some kind of change of preferences?

Have a look at this rather optimist article and try to give your opinion using the writing gidelines found in page 42 from your book.

Unit 6. Cultural Tourism task

and... spiritual tourism, why not? Did you know that this is nowadays one of the most demanded tourist products to get relaxed? In Spain, also, we are lucky to enjoy culture and relaxation at the same time with this kind of tourism, since most our our monasteries are Romanesque jewel of our history.



In order to do this task, go to page 106 from your book and read the instructions to write a good description of a monument. After that, visit some websites dealings with monasteries to be used as lodging for tourist to relax and try to describe to a future client what they will find in that "special hotel".

Here you are some webs to get information:

http://www.forbestraveler.com/resorts-hotels/spanish-monasteries-story.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17500498/

http://www.abadiadesilos.es/hospederia.htm

http://www.abadiamontserrat.net/castellano/index.htm

http://www.monestirs.cat/monst/conca/co22pobl.htm

and this one to remember some knowledge on the Romanesque art:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesque_architecture

Of course, if you find more website add them here.

** Don't forget to use the comments option to do your task ;)

Those "headlines" on the right...

As I can guess from the activity in the last poll that I added here in this blog, I realize that you don't know exactly what are the links on the right. Well. Most of the most famous British and American newspapers have a specialized section on "travels and tourism".

What I did was including feeds from all these important publications (The Times on line, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times, etc...) so that you don't have to visit all those pages in order to look for articles dealing with tourism.

This way, articles will go to in real "fresh" English you and won't have to look for specialized text to improve your reading any more. But not only updated articles will be shown here in this blog using this method, also video (National Geographic) and audio archives could be listened and archived in your hard disk or mp3 player so that you could listen in the underground or by car...

You will find too feed to pages to learn English such as the one from the BBC or ESL About English

Talking about travels...

For those of you who want to practice listening and speaking in an asynchronous way, here you are this useful blog with voice to practice different languages. This link leads you to the "travel section", but you could find many more there...

You could also participate as tourism professionals to be and answering questions shown there by people!

Do you like "wiking"?

If you like this way of publishing, why don't to collaborate with wikitravel ? As you can see, you could just read articles in many languages, buy why not writing about the place where you live? It would be a good way to practice your English...There is also an incredible section devoted to "tourism topics" perfect for you to practice before the exam!! Have a look at travel topics!

A good way to compare linguistic structures....

Islamic Tourism Magazine

Today, I had the intention to suggest you to write a text in relation to the pilgrimage to the Mecca, but I found something better. It is website written in diferent languages (Spanish English and French among others) which is perfect for you to contrast grammar structure in two languages. Remember that one of the worst errors that you have with writing in a foreing language is traying to translate directly from your mother tongue, so that you get a text full of wrong built structures. You may find some fragments or text which are not literal translations of the other language version, that could be due to cultural or pragmatic reasons. Pay attention to this point too.

Is Europe a country?

Good English Good Job - CV Preparation

Good English Good Job - CV Preparation

Here you are a good site to find c.v templates. You may have a look at them in order to tell us something about you in our "Páginas Personales" in the virtual course... Could you find anything useful related to tourism?

How and when did Japan receive its name?

How and when did Japan receive its name?

The English word for Japan came to the west from early trade routes. The early Mandarin Chinese word for Japan was recorded by Marco Polo as Cipangu. The two Chinese characters may be translated as "origin of the sun" or "land of the rising sun". However, the Cantonese word for Japan, from which the word Japan was probably originally born, is Jatbun. In Malay the Cantonese word became Japang and was thus encountered by Portuguese traders in Malacca in the 16th century. It is thought the Portuguese traders were the first to bring the word to Europe. It was first recorded in English in 1577 spelled Giapan.The Japanese flag is called Hinomaru (circle of the sun). The red circle on the white background symbolizes the sun.

Road trip (BBC English learning)

Have a look at some compositions written and read by some students of English from different countries. Just have a look and pay attention to the way they deal with this topic...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/roadtrip/journeys_shortlist.shtml

María Jordano

What types of tourism can you practise in India?

"Home to the Indus Valley civilization and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four major world religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism originated here, while Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism arrived in the first millennium CE and shaped the region's variegated culture. "

As you can see for these photographs, India is a wonderful country which offers a wide range of activities for tourists. If you have travelled to this country, please tell us about it.
If you haven't, imagine all the activities you could do there, the different types of tourism you could practise and tell us about it.

Why do airlines overbook flights?

Why do airlines overbook flights?Airlines routinely overbook flights to compensate for no-shows: people who reschedule or opt not to fly. An empty seat on a plane means a loss of revenue to an airline.Overbooking is a standard practice and perfectly legal. Many airlines regularly overbook busy routes by as much as 200 percent. By law, all bumped passengers are entitled to some form of compensation, usually in the form of a free ticket.Thus, the airlines have to balance the risk of a no-show with the compensation they have to pay to bumped passengers. They overbook according to a number of variables: whether it's a holiday season, how the airline market is doing in general, and perhaps most importantly, a specific flight's history of no-shows.An average of 50,000 passengers are bumped by the nation's ten largest airlines every year.
From: www.top-greetings.com

What's Ecotourism?

Listen to these students of biology talking about Ecotourism and compare to the texts founds in the textbook dealing with this topic. Could you find other ways of doing "Ecotourism"? Could you understand well what she said?

UOC – Fair tourism: Another way to travel

UOC – Fair tourism: Another way to travel

Have a look at this article written by the Open University talking about sustainable tourism. You will find also the translation in Spanish and Catalan, so that you will also have the opportunity to compare grammatical structures,a very useful way to improve your English writing.

Have a nice summer,