A Genre Analysis Of Tourist Information Texts

The present study falls into the domain of applied genre analysis, which is seen as a new development in discourse analysis. It focuses on the tourist information texts, which have been playing an important role in tourism publicity campaign but subject to criticism due to its poor quality as well. To solve the problem, a tentative analysis of the genre of the tourist information texts was carried out based on a corpus of 30 texts collected from various channels.Tentative as it is, the study has proved to be a full exploration of the genre, ranging from its macrostructure (move structure) to its microstructure (lexcio-grammatical level). In a wide perspective, we have come up with the generic structure potential (GSP) of the tourist information text consisting of three obligatory moves and eight optional moves by adopting an integrated theoretical framework, which comes largely from Swales, Bhatia and Hasan. In a narrow view, we have identified the various strategies the writers have employed in particular moves. Besides, possible explanation of the writers' choices of the moves and strategies are discussed as well. By doing so, we have displayed what the genre is and discussed why the choices are made. Finally, we touched upon the application of our study to pedagogy by suggesting a teaching model, conducting a case study and producing the software, which was supposed to aid the learners to acquire necessary genre knowledge of the texts as well as assisting the teachers in the teaching of the tourist information text writing.The paper concludes that this type of analysis shall not be taken as a product approach to the teaching of professional genre, but a process approach, which can shed some light on the teaching and acquiring of the new genres both for teachers and learners.