The anthropology of teaching English as a ‘lingua franca’ at Higher Education Tourism studies

Abstract

The presentation will discuss English as a tool of intercultural communication– lingua franca, and how it affects adult Tourism students’ perception of today’s rapidly changing, globalized world. Adult Education does not happen in vacuum; on the contrary, it is inextricably intertwined with its cultural and socio-economic context, and is in constant dialogue with it. University students of Tourism, who plan to be on the forefront of global exchange, liaise with stakeholders of different backgrounds and often act as mediators. Ability to communicate effectively in several directions is positively correlated with access to opportunity and endows the individual with cultural capital. Therefore, students should become aware of the multiplicity that pervades even the smallest unit of communication, and, not least, their own cultural ‘blind spots’. This process will be viewed through the prism of two adult education theorists. Far from normative statements, Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy and Jack Mezirow’s transformative learning theory view adult education as a social act, emphasizing on its potential to empower and bring about change, in the direction of equality, democracy, youth empowerment and peace- in other words, a global citizenship in the making.