BACKGROUND

With the enlargement of EU with the newly associated states language skills can be of particular value to business and industry. Industries connected with travel and tourism are increasingly feeling the need for people who speak foreign languages. Positions like head of tourism information services, tourism promoter, tourism informer, animator, transfer agent all they require adequate level of bilingual or multilingual knowledge. Hotel's personnel as lobby manager, reservationists, banquet coordinator, and concierge can be placed in such "guest contact points" in order to serve better the increasing number of tourists and travellers between EU countries.

The proposal corresponds to the need for higher level of language competencies of employees in the hotel and tourism industry. An important factor for the employability of such personnel is their demonstrated ability to perform their vocational tasks proficiently using foreign languages and their ability to mediate between lesser spoken languages (Bulgarian, Greek, Portuguese) and the most widely used languages of the European Union (English, German, French, Spanish). The learners, hotel and tourism employees in various countries, have to be put in the centre of transnational development work, requesting "non academic, practical business language".

At the same time language teachers/trainers will have at their disposal all necessary tools for creating language learning content, localized for 7 European languages. They will be able to author, produce, manage and distribute the sharable and re-usable language learning objects in an integrated workflow. The raw materials (e.g. text, html, audio and video slides, animation, JPEG and GIF images, XML documents) can be imported to and organized in a course structure for further publication of the final product in the desired SCORM format.