EXPERT GROUP (EG)ComTour EG
UUM College of Arts and Sciences
INTRODUCTION
Tourism and communication as a discipline have received much attention from researchers in a number of academic traditions, such as anthropology, art criticism, cultural criticism, geography, history, leisure studies, literary criticism, politics and sociology. However, when the two terms are coined together, evidently, little work has been carried out, particularly on tourism in sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and communication studies involving modalities other than language. Within this ComTour EG area of interest, we ask the following questions: What are the linguistic and communicative manifestations of Malaysia, global and local identities of people in socially superimposed roles 'tourist' and 'host'? Do tourists and hosts interact as cultural and economic (un-)equals? How do tourists and locals interact face-to-face? How are communication rights negotiated in tourist-host interaction? How are language, communication and face-to-face interactions in tourist sites represented and exploited in the genres of tourism writing, e.g. television holiday programmes, newspaper travel writing, inflight magazines, travel guides, postcard messages and postcard imagery? What is the role of English and other languages in tourism? How does travel industry position hosts/locals and tourist vis-à-vis each other? Many other manifestation of tourism communication can and will be investigated by this group of researchers from College of Arts and Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia.