Building Teacher Expertise Through the Design of a Task-Based and CLIL- Oriented English Course for Wine Tourism Postgraduates

Introduction

In recent years, many foreign language programmes have promoted the instrumental use of the target language in academic or occupational contexts. As learning goals in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) have shifted from a focus on developing specific language skills and vocabulary to a focus on promoting student expertise and employability, there is a call for new approaches that contribute to the integration of content and language with discipline-specific or professional skills for expertise (Kováčiková, 2020; Räsänen 2008; Yang, 2020). Therefore, many ESP teachers are seeking to assume a more professional identity by investigating students’ needs and implementing new methodologies for developing discipline-specific knowledge and competencies which will enable students to become experts in their fields and pursue successful careers. In the area of tourism, some studies (Ennis & Petrie, 2020; Fujita, 2019; García Laborda, 2003; Rahayu, 2020) suggest that both programme design and teaching methods based on student needs not only contribute positively to student interest and motivation, but are also decisive factors in terms of future professional success. Other studies (Eslami, 2010) defend the importance that ESP students assign to teaching methods that are less traditional and more focused on the student and the learning process. For this reason, foreign language teachers are urged to adopt new roles and identities that fully answer both students’ needs in an internationalization context and society’s expectations of expertise in professional settings.

Conducting previous research on students’ needs is considered a primary step in ESP syllabus design that may also help teachers to forge a new identity based on their ongoing professional growth. Therefore, this chapter proposes the combination of research and practice to design effective syllabi and implement teaching methods that can foster students’ skills more successfully in ESP contexts. It first describes the results of a survey carried out among 35 wineries committed to wine tourism to find out wine tourist postgraduate students’ specific needs. On the basis of these needs, the chapter describes the theoretical framework underlying the design and implementation of a holistic English syllabus that can help students acquire practical language and content competences that would prepare them to achieve their career goals, while at the same time meeting level B2 requirements as established in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). The theoretical framework addresses fundamental considerations for combining CLIL and TBL approaches in an ESP context to demonstrate that they can lead students enrolled in the specialized master for wine tourism to professional proficiency in English through up-dated authentic materials and enable them to effectively apply their linguistic skills to achieve their career goals in the field of wine tourism. Therefore, the aim of the syllabus was to place students within a context related to the wine industry using the methodological framework designed to help them link language and content acquisition to task-based learning in accordance with their field of study. Finally, a three-unit syllabus with learning objectives, activities, final tasks and assessment tools is fully described to demonstrate that students can benefit from teacher expertise based on research of student needs and foreign language teaching methodologies.