Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

IVAN BERAZHNY, HAAGA-HELIA UAS, UNIV. OF HELSINKIALEXANDRE KOSTOV, HAAGA-HELIA UASKAIJA LINDROTH, HAAGA-HELIA UASHELSINKI AS A BRAND: WORKING WITH STUDENTS TO MEASURE THE TOURISTICIDENTITY OF THE CITYThe paper presents a project commissioned by the Tourism Bureau of Helsinki andcarried out by a team of students in International Tourism Degree Programme atHAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences (Finland). The commissioner’s goalwas to identify viable branding strategies for the city of Helsinki on severalEuropean markets. The project was also designed as a part of HAAGA-HELIA’s“inquiry learning” curriculum and aimed at developing such skills in students astravel process management, research and development, team dynamics,integration of study and work, professionalism, and other.For this project the students were trained in several research methodologies,including Systemic Functional approach, and went on data collection trips toManchester and Stockholm. Their data included responses to questionnaires andmultimodal texts that promote Helsinki as a destination. Once collected, theadvertising texts and the responses to questionnaires allowed exploring howresidents of the studied areas perceived Helsinki as a destination and how theyreacted to particular advertising materials. Multimodal data analysis also allowedthe students to offer suggestions on why certain ads tended to advance the positiveperception of Helsinki as a destination and why certain texts did not.In their turn, the commissioner and the teachers who supervised the project sawthe advantages and challenges of the inquiry learning method, the project-basedcurriculum and the application of the Systemic Functional framework to the needsof the project.ReferencesBateman, John (2008) Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis ofMultimodal Documents. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Matthiessen, Christian, Marvin Lam, Kazuhiro Teruya, (2009) Key Terms in Systemic FunctionalLinguistics. London: Continuum.PAPER SESSION 9E - ROOM 5 - FRIDAY, 28 JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 89 Lisbon, July 2011