Travel Brochures for Teaching Product/Service Description

Abstract

Travel brochures can be well adapted for classroom use, owing to the extensive repertoire of adjectives and effective use of promotional language in the genre. This study was initiated to explore how descriptive adjectives are used in travel brochures so as to facilitate the teaching of product/service description among vocational students. Besides, exploring the generic structure of travel brochures will yield an insightful understanding on how promotional language works, through which vocational students can be enlightened to do their product/service description as promotional language is also considered an integral part of such genre. 6 travel brochures were chosen randomly and examined for their move structure based on Kathpalia’s (1992) Nine-Move Structure while the use of descriptive adjectives was explored with reference to Biber, Conrad & Leechs’ (1999) semantic categorization of adjectives. The four most significant moves, namely, appraising the products, establishing credentials; offering incentives and urging action were identified. As the most prominent category of descriptive adjectives, evaluative and emotive adjectives were found to weave nicely into the texts through a plethora of linguistic techniques, i.e euphoria, ego-targeting, the creation of isotropies and personification, corresponding to the main function of travel brochures to lure the tourists. Based on the main findings, a sample lesson which suggests as to how the travel brochures can be incorporated into an ESL classroom is proposed.