Analysing and teaching keywords in hotel brochure texts

Abstract

This study examined written texts in English from the hospitality industry. Authentic printed hotel brochures together with ESP learners’ productions from a genre-based writing instruction course were collected, forming the two corpuses to be examined. A corpus analysis generated wordlists as well as keywords. The results showed that the students’ choices of lexis differed to some extent from the word use in the authentic texts. This finding suggests that in a genre writing class instructing ESP learners in how to compose authentic English informative and promotional texts, priority needs to be given to teaching keywords, as these are the words that an English-speaking audience would normally expect to read in such texts. In addition, the genre-based instruction of analysing keywords helps learners transform their personal-style texts into more conventionally-accepted texts. In conclusion, this paper argues that subtle choices and constraints make the information in hotel brochures authentic, persuasive, trustworthy, and motivating.