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Tourism discourse in the 21st century: challenges and new directions

Editors 
Valeria Franceschi, University of Verona 
Sharon Hartle, University of Verona 

Tourism discourse, as developed across a wide variety of Internet sites, social media, and content sharing platforms, is populated by a range of linguistic and multimodal devices aimed at encouraging the engagement of users with the content provided. The increased ease of access to the Internet and subsequent growth of available resources goes hand in hand with the development of opportunities for providing the customers of the tourism industry with the essential information they may require. At the same time, promoting destinations is not the only role of digital tourism discourse. The expectations of customers and their experience can be managed by the interactive nature of the medium (Maci 2017). The Internet, in fact, can be said to have transformed the discourses of the tourism industry and the way in which relationships were traditionally created and maintained with its customers. In addition to traditional institutional and commercial material, social media and user-generated content (UGC) have indeed increasingly been taken into consideration as a data source in tourism studies, due to its potential influence on multiple aspects of tourism research, including destination marketing, electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWoM) and destination image (e.g. Pan et al. 2007; Wenger 2008). 

International tourism, which has until recently been considered to be a key economic sector both locally and internationally, is currently undergoing a moment of crisis due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. The global travel industry, in fact, in the year 2020 reduced its activities dramatically by more than 90% (Fernandes 2020), with negative consequences which are spilling over into other businesses that rely on tourism. This has come about largely as a result of movement restrictions imposed by governments globally, who have limited travel to an unprecedented extent. The effects have led to significant difficulties in the tourism field. From the viewpoint of research, however, the ongoing situation provides researchers with the opportunity to study the “resilience of the tourism industry” (Prayag 2020).

The emergency situation, in fact, may be considered to be a catalyst for the development of new communication modes and aims, which provide fertile terrain for researchers who wish to investigate evolving phenomena in the language being used as a part of the wider fields of both the English of Tourism (EoT) and in the teaching of that specific language, English for Tourism (EfT). The discourse of tourism has and is indeed changing due to the serious consequences of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. For this reason, a particular focus on such changes may lead to fruitful new avenues of inquiry for researchers.

We welcome contributions in English or Italian that consider a wide range of texts, contexts, theoretical and methodological research approaches into tourism discourse, the English of Tourism (EoT) and the teaching of English for Tourism (EfT). Data sources may include, but are not limited to: institutional and commercial websites and social media accounts, user-generated content such as blogs, vlogs, wikis, reviews, search engines, reference materials. 

Submissions related (but not limited to) the following topics are particularly welcome: 

• User-generated content and electronic Word-of-Mouth (eWOM) 
• Institutional and commercial tourism discourse online 
• Changes to tourism discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic 
• Implications for teaching English for Tourism (EfT) 
• Research into the ESP field: English of Tourism 
• EfT teaching practices and materials development 

References 
Fernandes, Nuno. “Economic Effects of Coronavirus Outbreak (COVID-19) on the World Economy.” IESE Business School Working Paper No. WP-1240-E, 2020. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3557504 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3557504 
Maci, Stefania. “Meaning-making in web 2.0 tourism discourse.” Ways of Seeing, Ways of Being: Representing the Voices of Tourism, Edited by Maurizio Gotti, Stefania Maci e Michele Sala. Bern: Peter Lang, 2017. 130-153.

Submitted manuscripts must be original and must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Submissions should be made via the journal’s website following the submission procedure detailed at https://iperstoria.it/about/submissions#onlineSubmissions 

Submissions will follow a process of double-blind peer review with independent referees.

The final decision will be made according to the relevance to the special section, originality of research approaches, methodology soundness. All submitted manuscripts must be compliant with the Iperstoria author guidelines.