Construction of a Specific Glossary in Spanish of Tourism on the Moodle Platform: A Challenge and a Temptation for Students due to the Danger of Plagiarism

Abstract

The present article deals with a practical experience we carried out with the objective of discussing whether the students of the Porto Accounting and Business School (ISCAP) could improve their performance in foreign languages through the construction of a thematic glossary. For this reason, the glossary was based on the activities that explore some of the relevant thematic areas in Spanish about which students of the 2nd year of Tourism Management have to know how to communicate orally and in writing. Students were expected to search the web, available texts, sites, and links from which they would select information on the language used, relevant to the chosen domains. We believed that, at an early stage, they would focus on the grammatical categorization (at the micro level), but we hoped that, as they progressed in the elaboration of the glossary, they would also analyze complete structures (at the macro level) and find patterns or discursive structures for a given domain. Our aim was for students, divided into groups of 2 to 4 people, to select and evaluate materials and use them to develop a thematic glossary and tools to actively improve their learning strategies. We took advantage of the fact that we were teaching in a multimedia environment (a language laboratory), thus benefiting from an e-learning and b-learning experience. However, the temptation to search for materials on the Web is the same, so I used to monitor the work from the beginning and always from around to avoid copying.