| Tourism is closely related to language,and the English tourism text for international publicity plays a significant role in attracting potential foreign tourists,and is an important channel for foreign tourists to know about China's tourism resources.However,most of the studies on the English tourism texts in China are conducted from the perspective of translation,giving emphasis to vocabulary,sentence patterns and linguistic features analysis.Inadequate attention was paid to the macro generic structure of the English tourism texts in China for foreign tourists,and few studies concentrated on the reader engagement resources of this genre in terms of linguistic analysis from a micro level.The present study selected 30 tourism texts in Wuhan Travel Guide,an English version published in 2018,as the research corpus,and adopted both qualitative and quantitative methods.Firstly,guided by the theory of genre analysis,and the communicative purposes of English tourism texts,the generic structure is worked out.Then the occurrence frequency of each move and step was counted to identify the obligatory moves and optional moves of this genre.Besides,the communicative purpose of each move and step was analyzed.Secondly,based on the engagement resources under Hyland's theoretical framework of metadiscourse,the distribution and functions of reader engagement resources in the collected data were analyzed.Finally,a comparison was made between the typical generic structure in advertisements identified by Bhatia(2004)and in the English tourism texts of Wuhan Travel Guide,a sub-genre of advertisement genres,with the view to analyzing the generic features of the English tourism texts in Wuhan Travel Guide,and further,to analyzing how the engagement resources choice contributes to the realization of such features.The study has found:(1)The generic structure in the English tourism texts of Wuhan Travel Guide is composed of 4 obligatory moves:headline,providing tour overview,detailing the destination and offering tourist tips,as well as 3 optional moves:indicating the target market,establishing credentials and mentioning attractions nearby."Providing tour overview" and "detailing the destination" are respectively realized by 4 steps.Each move serves for at least one of the communicative purposes of tourism texts:providing information,attracting readers' attention or persuading readers to take actions.(2)Reader engagement resources identified in the English tourism texts of Wuhan Travel Guide include reader pronouns,directives and personal asides.These engagement markers explicitly reveal the writers' reader awareness in writing tourism text,and contribute to its realization of communicative purpose.(3)Compared with the typical generic structure of advertisement identified by Bhatia(2004),the English tourism texts in Wuhan Travel Guide are prominent in informative function while weak in persuasive function,which entertain corresponding choices of engagement resources.Shared knowledge and questions didn't occur;as for reader pronouns,directives and personal asides,there are huge differences among each of their sub-categories in terms of distribution.This study offers valuable suggestions for the improvement of the English tourism texts in Wuhan Travel Guide,and can be instructive for English tourism text writing in China,as well as EFL teachers' and learners' ESP writing practice.Furthermore,it can contribute to the effective publicity of domestic tourist destinations,thus attracting more prospective tourists and boosting the inbound tourism economy. |
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