Navigating the Global Service Encounter: Pedagogical Implications of English as a Lingua Franca in Hospitality and Tourism Education: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Tourism presents a unique intercultural scenario, where English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) plays a critical role in temporary yet significant service interactions between guests and hosts from multiple language and cultural communities. English is widely estimated to serve as the medium for a majority of the world’s English communication among non-native speakers (Seidlhofer, 2004), yet many hospitality and tourism (HT) training programs continue to focus on native-speaker frameworks that are not aligned with workplace realities. Adopting a narrative literature review approach, this paper synthesizes approximately 30 peer-reviewed sources, selected using the explicit inclusion criteria described in the Methodology, on conversation analytic and ethnographic studies from varying regions of the world to examine the pedagogical implications of integrating ELF into HT curricula. The study highlights “Doing Explicit” as a key feature of communication within ELF service encounters, where tourism employees and service users rely on pragmatic techniques such as repetition, verbal and non-verbal hints, and collaborative dialogue to achieve the goal of a successful service outcome. Linguistic landscape research further suggests that, within a tourism context, English is a sign of modernity and high-quality service, and that in many everyday transactional exchanges intelligibility is generally prioritized over strict grammatical accuracy, although accuracy remains essential in higher-stakes exchanges such as pricing, bookings, safety instructions, and complaint handling. The review identifies a persistent gap between HT workplace communication and curricula that still emphasize native-speaker norms over the pragmatic competence and tolerance of uncertainty that ELF interactions actually demand. This paper, therefore, urges the integration of ELF to accommodate intelligibility, active engagement, genuine multicultural materials, and meaningful learning. This change in focus in HT teaching will better equip future workers of the global hospitality industry.