Effective Global English in Action

New York City is an ideal environment for observing Global English both working well and breaking down, so I’m looking for clues as to what makes the difference. It may be all about pragmatics.

Astro Restaurant in midtown Manhattan is a busy and highly multicultural work environment. I had breakfast at the counter Friday morning and observed an impressive work and communication flow conducted almost entirely in ESL. Astro buzzes with counter service, table service, phone-in orders, drop-in carryout orders, and deliveries in a very very small space. The staff is in constant motion, multitasking, socializing and all using an L2.

The manager, Mario, runs the place from behind the counter except that he always comes around to shake hands with his regulars who drop by for carryout. Almost all the language among employees and between employees and vendors is English as a second language. (If Ann Sarrafzadeh had been with me, she could tell you where they were all from ~ I’m guessing their L1 were Spanish, Russian, and Tagalog?)

I wondered how they communicated so competently in a situation that could have been chaotic. I could see that their language skills were not sophisticated but that their understanding and use of conversational pragmatics was highly effective.

I ate slowly enough to take in some of the linguistic exchanges.

• All of the employee exchanges were in English (as L2)
• All restaurant signs are in English
• Almost no one used articles
• Almost no one used plural suffixes (see footnote)
  
• There was never a mix-up of orders or a misunderstanding
• Small talk with customers focused on weather, sports, and headline news (nothing personal or controversial - well, except that the headline that day was the pregnant man story)
• Everyone used a lot of polite forms: please and thank you – and I mean a lot! In New York?

The next day I attended a session on cross-cultural classroom conversations. The speaker made the point that when someone makes a basic grammar mistake in a conversation, we assume he or she is a foreigner. However, when someone makes a basic cross-cultural mistake in a conversation, we will probably decide that he or she is rude and inappropriate. A natural response would be for us to end the conversation rather than continue with someone we find either overly emotive or unresponsive. The Astro counter staff didn’t have great grammar but did demonstrate fluency in non-verbal signs, proxemics, and topic choices.

We need to be sure that our students know and practice the pragmatics of different and appropriate communication styles. Having a conversation with a partner at a table is probably a fairly unusual setting for real-world communication. Lessons in the physical and topical boundaries of conversations may give them some cultural fluency that will be more effective than perfect grammar.

Footnote: I would have thought that using plural suffixes would have facilitated and clarified the number of eggs or orders, but they worked around it with things like “double scrambled egg”. (In fact, it may be that they deliberately choose lexical markers rather than suffixes to assure that the NNES cooks, who might not notice ‘s’ endings, get the message and the order right. Linguists predict that English will drop plural suffixes; these effective ESL conversations may be the harbinger. )

P.S. A waitress (perhaps Russian L1) warmly greeted a delivery man who had not been in for a couple weeks with a cheerful, “I never see you again!” I wish you all had been there so I could get your insights into Astro English!