Design and Development of the Mobile Application ENVITOUR (ENglish VIdeos for TOURism) to Practice Oral Production in English for Tourism

This paper shows the work carried out in the ideation and development of a mobile language learning application (MALL) designed specifically for students of English for tourism. This application, called ENVITOUR (ENglish VIdeos for TOURism), is based on the use of audio description (AD) as a pedagogical resource in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. In 2015 the app VISP (VIdeos for SPeaking) was developed as part of a project led by the ATLAS research group of UNED (Spain), which aimed to go further in the areas of mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) and pedagogical audiovisual translation (AVT) by bringing AD to mobile learning. Several publications show the success of such an application (Ibáñez et al. 2015, Ibáñez Moreno and Vermeulen 2016), but it was still very limited and rudimentary. With VISP in mind, the new ENVITOUR app starts from the idea of using AD as a teaching resource, but this time it has been adapted to the specific needs of tourism students, that is, to the area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). Besides, a large battery of small clips has been added, and a self-evaluation system based on post-questionnaire rubrics has been developed as a way to foster student self-learning and motivation. This paper constitutes, therefore, the methodological underpinnings for the development of an English for Tourism app that can be used to foster oral skills in an autonomous and motivating way.