Class Eight: rewriting & promotional writing

Class summary of 16 Nov 2009:

Last class, we spent most of the time rewriting some promotional essays which were written by your classmates about the Val d’Oise, the UCP or their home towns. You worked together to correct the mistakes in both grammar and vocabulary usage and then you reformulated the texts to improve them. I liked how you worked together, giving each other suggestions and proposing new solutions to “heavy handed” or “incomplete” sentence formulations. I hope this work was helpful to you (especially for those people whose papers were the Guinea Pigs).

Then you began to work on the first part of a former test that was given in the Expression Ecrite class several years ago. The idea is that you begin to compose spontaneously in the correct register. Each essay you write should be about 150 words.

HOMEWORK: Please finish writing this essay. And do questions a) and b) of Part Two of the exam (below). (Also, write the sentences from last week’s homework, see below on blog).

LEA L2 Expression Ecrite, 2006/2007

Writing Test

Part One:

Write a presentation of Innovia Cafés thanks to the following information (8 pts)

Innovia Cafés

- All income groups, all ages, family oriented clientele

- Good food and drink at affordable prices (£5-£10 per person)

- 16 cafés in London and South of England

Planning a nationwide expansion

- 10 new restaurants next year

- A further twenty within the next three years

Recent developments

- Strong competition from American chains

- Customer service is poor. Complaints frequent.

Part Two:

Read the following excerpt from the International Herald Tribune and:

a) Give a title to the passage (1)

b) Give an equivalent in English for the terms which are in bold (4)

c) Express your opinion about the development of Chinese tourism. What should European Companies do in order to adapt to this evolution (7).

International Herald Tribune
Roger Collis
11-17-2006

No category of travelers is monolithic as I have often reported. Terms like ''business'' and ''leisure'' disguise a raft of modes of travel, depending on type of business, or whether we combine business and pleasure to confound the stereotypes of the travel trade.

We have heard about ''High-End Leisure Travelers,'' who are said to have driven down prices in the premium cabins, and VFRs (''Visiting Friends and Relations'') who may turn out to be the same people. Now here come the Smerfs, who are traveling across Asia and the Pacific for Social, Military, Education, Religious, and Fraternity reasons. What they have in common is the will to travel even if times are tough and even at nonpeak times if it will help keep costs down.

According to Abacus International, a Singapore-based global distribution system (www.abacus.com.sg) formed with a consortium of 11 Asian airlines and Sabre, the Smerf market across Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore is worth $1.7 billion a year to the travel trade, and equivalent to about one third of the total MICE, or Meetings, Incentives, Conferences, and Exhibitions market in the region.

SMERFs are part of a wider trend in the travel market towards more “outcome based travel”, or traveling for a purpose other than just to see things.

Social travel traverses the fields of sports, special interest, women’s and ethnic groups, and volunteer workers. Asia’s 32 million-strong military is often on the move, usually in civilian mode, from countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Singapore. Education travel includes international students and summer camps, and study and activity tours to destinations like Canada, China, Britain, Australia, Germany and Turkey. Religious travel includes pilgrimages. Fraternal travel is also growing as civil associations such as Rotary International look to Asia as an ideal destination for international gatherings.

Chinese tourists are following the surge in exports that mimics the growth of Japanese tourism throughout the 1960s and 1970s – except that China, with 1.3 billion people, has a population 12 times greater than that of Japan. So don’t be surprised to find a Chinese traveller sitting next to you on a plane sometimes soon.

The World Tourism Organization (www.unwto.org) forecasts that China will produce 100 million outbound tourists by 2020, a spectacular growth from 20 million in 2003 and 31 million in 2005.