BUILDING TOUR-GUIDING SKILLS DURING THE ESP COURSE. TOURISM STUDENTS’ VISION OF THEIR POTENTIAL PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Abstract

Faced with an abundant array of professional paths to follow upon graduation, some of them not even in their own domain, many tourism students steer their future career towards tour-guiding. After all, being paid to travel the world and meet new people is not at all a bad start to the hospitality industry. However, a tour guide’s role is a very complex one: from facilitating the transmission of cultural/ historical/geographical information to mediating communication in a pluricultural space; from physically leading the tourists’ group through the meandering city streets to solving tourist-host linguistic misunderstandings, to name just a few. A plethora of communication and soft skills are involved in exercising this job and in preparing students to practice it to the highest standards possible. The current presentation endeavors to delineate the skills and activities an ESP teacher should focus on for best preparing the students for this job. In this respect, the teacher’s perspective has been generously influenced by the students’ own perceptions on their potential new career and the knowledge they extracted from their specialism courses.