THE USE OF TRAVEL BLOG WRITING IN A TERTIARY LEVEL ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES COURSE

Blogs can be used as constructive means in EFL teaching allowing learners to exert control over their own writing and enabling them to communicate with the global community of internet users. Among different types of blogs, travel blogs can be employed as pedagogical means for real life based learning and L2 writing improvement. Through travel blogs, learners can both explore different places and write about their travel experience in L2. However, the use of travel blog writing in teaching English for Specific Purposes (ESP) has not yet been investigated. In this study, travel blog writing was integrated into a tertiary level ESP course aiming to improve learners’ linguistic skills in the fields of tourism and travel. The research investigates the learners’ views about blog writing as a part of their ESP course through a questionnaire and interviews. According to the findings, travelling and writing about the tourist attractions of one’s city via a personalized blog was found to increase writing motivation but the experience was also defined to be demanding as it requires heavy workload. Overall, this experience was reported to enhance autonomous, reflective and collaborative learning, increase cultural awareness and contribute to learners’ self-expression and L2 writing improvement.

E-WoM di mom travel blog: keterikatan, pengaruh informasi, dan kekuatan informasi visual

The Social Networking System (SNS) is used to share messages through electronic WoM (e-WoM) through blogs. Related to someone in e-WoM has a social construction motivation that involves tie strength and informational influence. This article analyzes how attachment, informational influence, the power of visual information in e-WoM user engagement on mom travel blogs can determine travel preferences and decisions for families. In addition to conducting a literature ulasan, this article also analyzes Mom Travel Blogs in Indonesia, namely jalanjalankenai.com and momtraveler.com. These blogs found that the social relationship between the reader and the blogger is an attachment that motivates involvement in e-WoM on the blog. These blogs also provide informational influence and present the power of visual information to convince readers of travel preferences.

Analysis on the Structure and Purposes of Travel Blog Posts

Travel blogs have become a huge online platform used as a benchmark for Internet users to plan holiday itineraries, consider choices, and finalize travel-related purchase decisions. As popular travel blogs are often visited by online readers globally, there might be a shift in the purposes for writing travel blogs nowadays compared to traditional blog posts. Previous studies discussed the characteristics of blogs as a communicative platform; however, discussion on language features and blog structures used to achieve certain purposes of travel blogs is still scarce. This study, hence, aimed to evaluate the text structure and language function employed in popular travel blogs to determine their overall purposes. Eighteen posts were selected from six popular travel blogs and analyzed qualitatively by using Pascual’s (2018) blog structure moves and Jakobson’s (1960) language function framework. The findings showed that the travel blog posts consisted of four moves: situational, descriptive, closure, and invitational moves and that most of the moves mainly employed referential and emotive functions. Hence, the main purposes were to provide information on travel destinations and to express the bloggers’ feelings towards their travel experiences. The findings implied that the purposes of popular travel blog posts nowadays are related to the role of blogs as a source of information and the role of travel bloggers as social influencers in the online community.

Speech acts in travel blogs: users’ corpus-driven pragmatic intentions and discursive realisations.

Travel blogs epitomise an informal, digital environment where international users engage in dialogical interactions about their travelling experiences. While doing so, they deploy a range of pragmatic intentions to exchange information and build discussion. Speech acts (Searle, 1975) encapsulate those intentions, and are generally assumed to differ in their illocutionary force depending on users’ communicative needs, and on whether hosted in posts or in comments. This paper explores the frequency and saliency of speech acts in travel blogs, by undertaking a contrastive study as regards generic features in an exploratory corpus of 18 Englishmediated travel blog posts and 367 travel blog comments. The three circles of English (Bolton & Kachru, 2006) are used to balance bloggers’ sociolinguistic background and represent native and nonnative speakers. A corpus-driven typology of speech acts for the travel blog is designed, since aprioristic, traditional classifications may not match users’ intentions in asynchronous, globalised, computer-mediated settings. Connections of particular speech acts with each of the generic instances, whether posts or comments, are revealed, and prototypical discursive realisations of those speech acts are qualitatively provided. The study unveils bloggers’ communicative practices and yields pragmatic and discursive resources users can handle to encode their pragmatic intentions in travel blog posts and comments.

Wanderlust without Wandering: Managing a Travel Blog during the COVID-19

ABSTRACT This teaching case describes how Mary Teles, a digital entrepreneur and creator of Vida Mochileira travel blog, faced the crisis caused by COVID-19 in 2020 and how the preventive measures of closing borders and restricting locomotion and traveling during the pandemic represented a challenge to the continuity of a business that produces content for travelers. This real case was developed with primary and secondary sources of information and is recommended for application at Marketing, Services Marketing, and Digital Marketing disciplines in undergraduate or postgraduate courses of Business Administration and Hospitality and Tourism, allowing the discussion of the theoretical concept of positioning in the context of social media, in the tourism sector.

A Dangerous Business: Exploring Heroism in Travel Blogs Through Emphasis Framing

Emphasis framing has routinely been applied to hard news. This article extends it to "softer" media texts. It considers a specific example of how travel blogs use the frame of heroism, and the underlying ideologies it reveals about how people imagine a destination and conceive of Others. We analyze 400 travel blog posts to assess how bloggers recount tales of overcoming different challenges, and how this subsequently directs their own role performances. This article offers the use of heroism in travel blogs as evidence that emphasis framing is a critical aspect of nonnews media texts, and that it can also be interpreted to offer insights into ideologies that underpin culture. This article argues for more analysis of emphasis framing in lifestyle texts as a means to identify social realities and the role the media plays in creating and maintaining them.

Analysis of Effective Digital Communication in Travel Blog Business Models

The tourism industry has been affected dramatically by the appearance of the Web 2. This research aims to perform a clear and measurable evaluation of a varied sample of ten of these travel blogs and their application of the Web 2.0 attributes in order to present a potential set of guidelines to be applied by future blogs. The study is based on an in depth comparative analysis of various metrics related to the blogs’ profile, content, website performance/usability, social media, and marketing usage, with the help of different tables that were created for each of these sections. The results are later combined with the expert opinion of five different travel, journalism, and/or digital communication professionals. It is anticipated that travel blogs that operate as businesses utilize the Web 2.0 tools and informative attributes not only in their content, but also in their distribution, design, and digital ecosystems.