The Use of Corpora and IT in Evaluating Oral Task Competence for Tourism English

Abstract

This paper describes a method in oral fluency evaluation for Tourism English according to a corpus-based lexical approach. Our main research focus is placed on measuring oral skill competence among Tourism English (TE) learners by contrasting their word use and linguistic fluency, achieved in two types of oral tasks, with corpus data frequencies. Information Technology (IT) resources and electronic corpora are two integrated tools in the evaluative approach to identify significant performance changes between learners who have managed such electronic resources and learners who have not.