The challenge
Tourist guides are important facilitators of the the intercultural dialogue with tourists and increase tourists’ awareness about environmental and socio-cultural challenges thus promoting sustainable tourism. In this role their multilingual knowledge and their intercultural skills become essential, as well as acquiring skills in new forms of guiding tours. Very often traditional sightseeing tours are focused too much on historical and architectural data, which has been the common way of conduct. However the tourists are also interested in anecdotes and short urban stories which bring a smile onto their face and make a sightseeing tour more enjoyable.
The solution
The project exploits modern local stories that reveal to visitors domestic characteristics of life style through anecdotes, history presented through personal stories and contemporary fiction, interactions between the traditional/historical places and the contemporary environments around these (clubs, shops, significant places for some community groups, like artists, young people, retired elder people, etc). Linguistic and cultural promotion is taking place through the use of popular stories, such as regional and local legends, films and book stories, urban gossips. Tourist guides are encouraged and motivated to use story telling as part of their normal guiding.
‘Tell Me a Story’ gathers these stories, processes them, and develops a modern foreign language learning material for tourist guides which take state of the art didactics into account, so that they can use them in real life situations.