Advantages And Challenges Of A Multilingual Environment In Teaching Tourism Terminology

Abstract

Tourism education increasingly unfolds in multilingual classrooms where learners, instructors, and authentic materials draw on two or more languages. This article examines the pedagogical advantages and challenges of multilingual settings for teaching tourism terminology, with a focus on how translanguaging practices, cross-linguistic mapping, and corpus-informed materials shape terminological accuracy, collocational competence, and pragmatic appropriateness. The study reports on a mixed-methods intervention in a guide-interpreter program that integrated English, Russian, and Uzbek as resources for learning rather than as rigidly separated codes. Data sources included a pedagogical corpus of destination texts and museum scripts, performance-based tasks simulating live tour narration and sight translation, and qualitative reflections from learners and instructors. Results indicate that multilingual environments accelerate concept formation, strengthen retrieval through contrastive cues, and enhance sensitivity to audience design. At the same time, they introduce risks of negative transfer, unstable borrowing, and overreliance on promotional calques that dilute technical precision. Implications are offered for sequencing instruction, curating bilingual glossaries with usage notes, and aligning evaluation with real-world communicative demands in tourism.