A Cross-Cultural Experience in Tourism Studies

The present article is the result of a joint teaching experience carried out by Giovanni Ruggieri, lecturer of Tourism Economics at the University of Palermo, and Ninfa Pagano, lecturer of English language, University of Palermo; the experience was addressed to our students of Tourism Studies at the Department of Economics, University of Palermo. The rationale at the basis of this teaching experience was to provide Italian students with extra language practice applied to more than one of their main fields of study in order to show how two different subjects, i.e. Tourism Economics and the English language, can be linked, thus working as a reinforcement for students in both areas. Prof. Ruggieri suggested proposing to our students the reading of an article in English which focused on a comparative analysis of tourism in the Mediterranean islands; the article took into consideration aspects such as bed-place capacity and occupancy rates, strategies to develop sustainable tourism and tourism policies. Students were asked to analyse it and parallelly to deepen the understanding of the English text through a series of language activities aiming to improve comprehension, lexis expansion and aspects of English syntax. The objectives we set were thus twofold: improving our students’ knowledge about aspects concerning Tourism Economics while increasing their linguistic competence in English. Such cross-cultural experience has recently been introduced in Italian schools as well with the name of CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning). However, it had seldom been proposed at university level, so we carried it out on an experimental basis.