Travel and Tourism
English Syllabus for Autumn 2010
This post is now only for reference. As of September 2012, I'm teaching another course in Travel and Tourism, and I have another syllabus for that course.
As the travel and
tourism industry focuses on people as individuals, this course necessarily
involves oral communication. Students will be required to give regular
oral presentations on given topics. This course also aims to acquaint
students with aspects of the hospitality and tourism industries.
Student scores will be
calculated as follows:
Participation (including
punctuality and attendance): 30%
Mid-term exam: 30%
Final Exam: 40%.
If a student arrives for
class only a few minutes before the end of a class period, that student will be
recorded as absent for that class period; unless the student can offer a valid
reason for tardiness. Attendance will usually be reported to the school
each Tuesday. For that reason, if a student is absent with good reason,
it is the student's responsibility to inform the teacher no later than the
Monday following the class.
The textbook for this
course is/was Tourism, Book 1: Oxford English for Careers, written by R. Walker
and K. Harding; published by the Oxford University Press. I have been informed--two weeks after school
started--that this book is either out of stock or out of print. Through
the efforts of another Hsing Wu College instructor, Marion, I'm told that
another book is coming soon. When it arrives, I can begin making specific
lesson plans.
I have also discovered
that very few of the students in either of the Travel and Tourism English
classes actually speak English. This has led to the need for some changes
in class goals. Current goals are as follows:
1. That the students
will learn to understand spoken and written English well enough to achieve the
other major goal of this course. The first half of the class each week
will be spent watching English-language videos of various lengths subtitled in
English. From time to time, I will test their comprehension of these
videos.
2. That the students
will organize into teams acting as travel agencies. Students who are able
to speak English will lead the teams. The teams' projects will be to
describe in detail how they would organize tours of less-traveled areas such a Iran and Yap,
Micronesia.
The teaching and learning strategy for this
course, Travel and Tourism English, is project based, cooperative
learning. Project based means "learning by doing in
realistic situations." Cooperative
learning means that students
learn from both the teacher and from one another, and the teacher may even
learn from the students. Students will form small teams acting as tourist
agencies. These teams will design vacations to places other than the well-worn
tourist resorts or tourist traps. Think of it as somewhat like virtual
reality; it's a game with a purpose.