A Comparative Study of Iran and Thailand’s Tourist Brochures in ‘Describing the Attraction’ Move

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the linguistic features in ‘Describing the Attraction’ moves of Iranian and Thai tourist leaflets. In promoting tourism, various forms of marketing communication are employed by tourism organizations to transmit important information to tourists. Tourist brochures and leaflets are major means of providing information on tourism areas, promoting it in order to encourage both local and foreign visitors to travel. In this regard, having a comprehensive insight about the dominant generic features of texts used within the discourse community of tourism seems to be of paramount importance. This study was carried out to investigate the generic structure of ‘Describing the attraction move’ section of tourist brochures developed in Iran and Thailand. In doing so, the corpus of 20 tourist brochures written in English by Iranian and Thai tourist websites ( 10 Iranian and 10 Thai) were selected and analysed with regard to frequency of moves , modal verbs , imperatives and personal pronouns found in ‘Describing the Attraction’ move in Thai and Iranian tourist brochures. The similarities and differences between the samples were analysed and elaborated and the possible sources of discrepancies and shortcomings of the samples were discussed. The findings of the study can have implications for ESP teachers and material developers and also shed light on effective ways of developing tourist brochures.