The use of interviews in Spanish lessons for tourism students

The purpose of recounting this experience is to show the stages of the task carried out by the students of the Curso Superior de Turismo [Advanced Tourism Course] of CEFET/RJ [Federal Centre for Technological Education Celso Suckow da Fonseca, Rio de Janeiro], which was introduced with a double goal: on the one hand, for students to put into practice their curricular knowledge on the interview as a discourse genre and, on the other hand, to promote the reflective activity of the dialectology of Spanish. The interview was chosen since it enables the teacher to diversify the transmission means, to deal with cohesion and coherence devices, to encourage the interaction between the subjects involved and to make text transcription and edition tasks possible. Along with the contribution of Concha Moreno’s research (1998), we aim at organizing an activity that offers Tourism students the possibility to work on the idea of respect for cultural diversity and, at the same time, the opportunity to develop different skills from the recording of interviews with native speakers.