Yes, Engineers Need Small Talk

Karen Schwelle, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA

It’s right there in the name: as practitioners in English for Specific Purposes (ESP), we focus on “purpose.” For a given purpose—usually work in a particular occupation/role or education in a particular discipline—we investigate what language a learner needs and aim to facilitate growth in their proficiency with that language.

Our learners tend to think with similar linearity. When English learners like my graduate engineering students count on their academic achievements to open doors to their next important opportunity, they aim to strengthen the language most central to their academic success. For this purpose, they typically name traditional language skills for academic settings such as understanding lectures, writing formally, and expanding their discipline-specific vocabulary. Given this focus on academics, some English learners in the U.S. may underestimate the importance of “purposeless” language such as small talk. Even some English teachers may present small talk as simply a meaningless ritual or a way to patch over an “awkward” silence.

However, small talk’s relational purposes have long been recognized by linguists and scholars in related disciplines. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, noting relational talk’s “affirmations of some supremely obvious state of things,” differentiated it from language with clear content and purpose while recognizing its role in establishing social bonds (Malinowski, 1923/1969, p. 313, as cited in Mugford, 2024, p. 36). More recently, scholars have affirmed that relational talk can build professional networks and ultimately yield valuable professional opportunities (Mugford, 2024). Once a person has landed a job, effective interpersonal skills—including relational talk—are necessary to make an impression as a good employee and co-worker (Holmes, 2005). Those skills need to include flexibly moving between relational and task-oriented talk (Di Ferrante, 2021). The more closely we examine relational talk, the more complications and nuances emerge.

Mentoring relationships, networking connections, and teamwork skills are crucial for students in one course I teach, Communication Tools, which is designed for first-year international master’s degree students coming to this U.S. university directly from their home country. Most students in Communication Tools express ambitions to gain research experience and/or internship experience during their master’s degree program to position themselves for a PhD program or further opportunities in industry. In the meantime, their coursework regularly requires them to work in teams with classmates. In fact, one of the seven student outcomes in accreditation criteria for engineering programs is that students need to be able to “function effectively in teams,” including “[creating] a collaborative and inclusive environment” (ABET, 2023, Criterion 3, Outcome 5). When they first arrive, most Communication Tools students tell me that they experience some degree of discomfort in speaking in the academic—but quasi-professional—contexts where they interact with professors and peers. Stronger skills at relational talk can help bridge some of these gaps.

When I encourage students to engage in relational talk in their daily lives, I tell them to start small. I advise them to practice in situations like these, in escalating order of complexity:

• Greeting and thanking a shuttle bus driver
• Complimenting a barista on their glasses, jewelry, or another style choice
• Speaking with a classmate as they walk from the parking garage to class
• Speaking with one of their professors as they wait for their boba tea order in a campus café
• Speaking with a professor they just met at a departmental event

Many English language texts address relational talk in terms of appropriate topics, ways to initiate and conclude the conversations, typical expressions, and variations in relational talk according to one’s relationship with the interlocutor(s). I use Dushku & Thompson’s (2021) Campus Talk textbooks, which are grounded in corpus research, to cover these elements of relational talk.

Over about four class periods, from the first day of the semester to approximately the halfway point, students engage in the following activities to build their relational talk skills. (These class periods are nonconsecutive so that we can interleave other topics/skills in this integrated skills course.) Of these, 3, 4, 5, and 6 are adapted from Dushku & Thompson (2021):

1. A networking-style self-introduction/elevator pitch
2. An online discussion post (an audio recording) in which students give an example of an acquaintance in their home country/culture with whom they periodically interacted and answer related questions about that experience.
3. Opening a small talk conversation
4. Conversational stories about topics appropriate for small talk
5. Engaging as a listener

• Continuers/Backchanneling (“Uh-huh,” “Right,” etc.)
• Requests for clarification
• Expressions of surprise, empathy, and other reactions
• Expressions of evaluation (“That’s quite an experience!”/“Good for you!”)

    6. Concluding small talk

• Pre-conclusion expressions (“It’s been nice to talk with you”)
• Closing expressions

Items 1 and 2 are material I added. The networking-style elevator pitch not only helps students get acquainted with each other on the first day of class but also starts to prepare them for the career expo that takes place on our campus about a month into the semester. While it’s relational talk at a superficial level, it can also pave the way for more meaningful professional connections with peers, mentors, recruiters, and potential employers. The discussion post activates students’ prior knowledge of and experience with relational talk in their home cultures, invites comparison between the practice of relational talk in the U.S. and elsewhere, helps students identify skills and approaches that are transferable from familiar contexts, and prompts them to plan on at least one situation where they could try relational talk on campus or in the community.

Within item 4, I supplement the material from Dushku & Thompson (2021) about conversational stories. Their material focuses mainly on language and strategies for telling stories among peers for social purposes. I added material about conversational stories within professional contexts such as a job interview. Knowing that students might encounter behavioral interview questions and are typically coached to answer these with a Situation-Task-Action-Response (STAR) format, I taught them this format. For the actual storytelling exercise, I then gave students the choice of telling a personal story in a social context or a work-oriented story in response to their choice of some behavioral interview prompts, e.g., “Tell us about a time when you made a mistake at work.”

To assess students’ skills, I assign the following work:

1. A small talk log. Students log five small talk conversations during the first two weeks or so of the semester, including the setting, the person they spoke with, and how they knew them (e.g., Uber driver/stranger, neighbor/acquaintance, etc.). They also briefly reflect on how the conversations went and what they might do differently in the future. From this assignment, I can assess if students are tending to choose appropriate settings, interlocutors, and topics for small talk. I can also respond to questions or concerns they expressed in the reflection and address common areas of difficulty—and celebrate successes—in class.

2. An in-class conversational story. Around the fifth week of the semester, students share a story of a personal experience intended for either a social or academic/professional setting. First, they share the story with one or two classmates acting as interlocutors appropriate for the setting the storyteller envisions (e.g., classmates talking about their spring break vs. a job interview). Then, they share it with the whole class. I can then provide additional guidance as needed in nuances such as responding to relational talk as a listener or finding a positive way to “spin” a lesson learned at work.

3. An in-class three-person role play. This role play takes place at approximately the midpoint of the semester. Students are assigned roles in a situation where relational talk needs to transition into a task-oriented problem-solving conversation involving two classmates and a third person in a role of authority (e.g., a professor or advisor).

Certain challenges arise consistently. Some students have difficulty wrapping their minds around a conversation without any task orientation. For example, their small talk logs might consist entirely of task-oriented service encounters. Other students might simply transition more quickly than I would expect from, say, talking about FC Barcelona in a role play situation with a more senior graduate student to asking for advice about how to succeed in their graduate program.

Teaching the practice of relational talk has prompted me to notice the sometimes porous boundary—in the U.S., at least—between relational and task- or information-oriented talk. More importantly, the ways my Communication Tools students approach relational talk challenge me to think critically about things like the tradeoffs between consistently applied and clear grading criteria on one hand and, on the other hand, allowing room for students to express themselves in a way that feels authentic to their personalities and cultural backgrounds. I’ve concluded that I prefer to err on the side of promoting students’ “ownership” of their self-expression in relational talk (Mugford, 2024) than enforce a subjective and possibly too narrow view of what’s “professional” and culturally appropriate. I encourage fellow ESP practitioners to consider the potential benefits for students of teaching of relational talk while embracing and critically examining its complexities.

References

ABET. (2023). Criteria for accrediting engineering programs, 2024 – 2025. https://www.abet.org/accreditation/accreditation-criteria/criteria-for-accrediting-engineering-programs-2024-2025/

Di Ferrante, L. (2021). Transitioning between small talk and work talk through discourse markers: Evidence from a workplace spoken corpus. Brno studies in English, 2, 7–30. https://doi.org/10.5817/BSE2021-2-2

Dushku, S., & Thompson, P. (2021). Campus talk: Effective communication beyond the classroom (Vol. 1 and 2). Edinburgh University Press.

Holmes, J. (2005). When small talk is a big deal: Sociolinguistic challenges in the workplace. In M.H. Long (Ed.), Second language needs analysis (pp. 344–372). Cambridge University Press.

Mugford, G. (2024). Exploring the power of social talk in a foreign language: Possibilities for integration and critical pedagogy. Routledge.

Karen Schwelle is a senior lecturer in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches communication courses for undergraduate and graduate students. She has served as chair and in other leadership roles for the English for Specific Purposes Interest Section in TESOL International Association.