Tourism, to repeat, happens in languages and does so as an extension of everyday life. Tourism concentrates the multilingual, intercultural and material experiences of people, significantly. It does so at times of great symbolic significance to tourists, times that are anticipated and that are associated, culturally and often personally, with happiness. Such times are often, following Turner, characterised as both liminal and liminoid, as discussed earlier. They regularly involve an inversion from fluent speaker to a ‘foolish’ gesticulation in a variety of contexts of communication, as translation fails. What might happen when tourists begin to learn set scripts from phrase books, or elaborate scripts from tourist survival language courses? What is the relationship between mimesis, tourism and language learning and what forms and modalities does this relationship take?

In this chapter I develop the focus on play by examining the place of role play, of script and of performance in the context of tourist language learning. In previous chapters I have shown how there is a shift from literacy to orality in the tourist language classroom and in the curriculum-asdesired by tourist learners. The motivation is for good conversation to occur and the phrase book, the black board, the vocabulary books and notes to become redundant artefacts, with their contents being carried in the body and not in the bag. The processes I focus on in this chapter relate to the way in which this occurs as phrases, grammatical rules, elements of phonetics and of wider vocabulary begin to form into fluency. Tourist language classes are significant rehearsal times involving role play and enactment of tourist scripts for tourists as language learners.