Social cohesion in a globalized world is accomplished in the moment-to-moment unfolding of human encounters. In the travel industry, social cohesion is especially important, as it is the goal of hospitality service. How do novices in this profession develop the interactional competence to build interpersonal relationships with guests, albeit briefly for the duration of each encounter? What situated mechanisms take place as the novices modify their interactional practices to accomplish tasks more effectively?
In our study, we address these questions by tracing the development of interactional competence by a novice guest-relation officer at a hotel in Vietnam in her interactions with international guests in English as a lingua franca. We focus on small-talk topic initiation by the novice guest-relation officer about the guests' trip duration. Our data include 110 audio-recorded guest-escorting walks over 10 months. We use conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974) to examine participants' conduct from an emic perspective.
The findings show that at the beginning, the novice used the formulations "what time" and "how much time have you stay in X hotel?", which eventually led to one extended repair sequence. Immediately after this encounter, a different formulation, "how long will you stay here?" was used. The novice then shifted to yet another formulation, "how many nights will you stay here?.", which was used until the end of the data collection despite some interactional troubles. Considering the overall trajectory of the changes, we see that an extended interactional problem seemed to trigger a modification of her interactional practices. Further, close examination of the novice's topic initiation about guests' duration of stay revealed that she may have appropriated the guests' responses to her questions, resulting in the workplace-specific linguistic routine, "how many nights will you stay here?." Once this routine had been established, it was diversified (e.g., "you stay with us X nights?") and brief interactional troubles did not lead to a change in this routine.
We argue that the guests' in situ indications of the specific trouble sources in repair initiation and the practical process of achieving mutual understanding informed the novice of what needed to be changed in her interactional practices. Unlike previous research, which showed how L2 speakers incorporated linguistic materials in repairs by co-participants (e.g., Brouwer & Wagner, 2004; Hauser, 2013) our study demonstrates that an L2 speaker may pick up linguistic materials from co-participants' turns associated with but produced beyond the repair sequence.
This study corroborates the importance of experiential on-the-job learning in vocational education, where novices contingently work out solutions to improve their work performance.
Brouwer, C. E., & Wagner, J. (2004). Developmental issues in second language conversation. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 29-47. https://doi.org/10.1558/japl.v1.i1.29
Hauser, E. (2013). Stability and change in one adult's second language English negation. Language Learning, 63(3), 463â€"498. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12012
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. & Jefferson, G. (1974). A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn Taking for Conversation. Language, v. 50, n. 4, p. 696-735.
