Funded by a Macquarie University Research Development Grant (2007), this project investigates the role of multilingual practices and language learning in the Australian tourism industry through a case-study of Japanese post-war baby boomers - the dankai sedai - as international visitors. The key research questions are:

1. What kinds of oral, written and computer-mediated linguistic practices can be observed in tourism-related sites in Australia-Japan tourism-related sites that cater to the dankai sedai?
2. What language ideologies are implicit in these practices?
3. How are these practices, ideologies and discourses tied to the construction of identities of;
   

• Australia as a travel destination and specific destinations within Australia, 
• tourism workers,both in Australia and Japan, and 
• the dankai sedai, as well as other tourists with whom they may be identified or contrasted with?  

In a previous study, funded by the Swiss National Fund on 'languages, identities and tourism: challenges for Switzerland in the context of globalization', the two co-chief investigators, Ingrid Piller and Alexandre Duchene, identified five crucial tourism practices. The present project aims to enhance understanding of these five tourism practices by undertaking a sociolinguistic ethnography of the following:

1. Tourism marketing of Australia and competing English-speaking destinations, particularly Canada and New Zealand, as destinations for dankai sedai;
2. Tourism training, both in training institutes and on-the-job training that tourism workers receive to cater for dankai sedai, including the level of specificity of this training: are dankai sedai considered as a specific market segment, is training specific to cater for Japanese tourists, or are all tourists from non-English speaking backgrounds treated as one homogeneous group?;
3. Tourism interactions that occur between dankai sedai tourists and tourism workers in crucial sites such as souvenir shops or on guided tours, and how these interactions are framed by the marketing that dankai sedai are exposed to, the training service workers have received, the global similarities of tourism-host interactions and the local and national specificities of tourism-host interactions;
4. Tourism spacing, i.e. the semioticization of a place as a tourism destination that receives dankai sedai;
5. Tourism narratives that dankai sedai tell of their experiences in Australia, and that tourism service providers narrate their experiences with dankai sedai.

On the basis of this case study, it is the overall aim of this project to provide a comprehensive understanding of the role of languages and communication in tourism practices, which will contribute to understanding the changing role of multilingual practices and language learning in the context of globalization. Additionally, the findings will provide insight into the linguistic practices of tourism-related workplaces. Therefore, the findings have the potential to inform decisions in language policy decisions in the tourism sector. This in turn may contribute to strengthening Australia’s competitiveness as an international tourism destination.