“If there’s no participation," Steggles cautions, “you don’t know whether you’ve been understood or not.In society today, rapid changes have been performed when discussing diversity throughout the country. He recommends making the same point in a couple of different ways and asking for some acknowledgement, reaction or action. Otherwise, after the meeting they come up and say, ‘What was all that about?’ Or they walk away and nothing happens because they haven’t understood.” “You just have to wait a heartbeat and give them a chance. “It could be that the non-native speaker is trying to formulate a sentence,” he says. In meetings, Anglophones tend to speed along at what they consider a normal pace, and also rush to fill gaps in conversation, according to Steggles. “People who’ve learned other languages are good at doing that, but native speakers of English generally are monolingual and not very good at tuning in to language variation,” she says. When trying to communicate in English with a group of people with varying levels of fluency, it’s important to be receptive and adaptable, tuning your ears into a whole range of different ways of using English, Jenkins says. But there’s a fine line between doing that and being patronising.” Based in Paris, Steggles says, “you need to be short, clear and direct and you need to simplify. “If you can communicate efficiently with limited, simple language you save time, avoid misinterpretation and you don’t have errors in communication,” Nerriere says.Īs an Englishman who’s worked hard to learn French, Rob Steggles, senior marketing director for Europe at telecommunications giant NTT Communications, has advice for Anglophones. Since launching Globish in 2004 he’s sold more than 200,000 Globish text books in 18 languages. “It’s not a language, it’s a tool,” he says. That’s why Nerriere devised Globish - a distilled form of English, stripped down to 1,500 words and simple but standard grammar. “Too many non-Anglophones, especially the Asians and the French, are too concerned about not ‘losing face’ - and nod approvingly while not getting the message at all,” he says. It’s the native speaker who often risks missing out on closing a deal, warns Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere, formerly a senior international marketing executive at IBM. “A lot of the information goes amiss,” Coulter says. So among themselves they came up with an agreed version, which might or might not have been what was intended by the California staff. Despite being competent in English, the Germans gleaned only the gist of what their American project leader said. In Berlin, Coulter saw German staff of a Fortune 500 company being briefed from their Californian HQ via video link. “I often hear from non-native colleagues that they do understand me better when listening to me than when doing so to natives,” says the head of training and proposition, IP Operations at Zurich Insurance Group.ĭale Coulter, head of English at language course provider TLC International House in Baden, Switzerland, agrees: “English speakers with no other language often have a lack of awareness of how to speak English internationally.” Zurich-based Michael Blattner’s mother tongue is Swiss-German, but professionally he interacts mostly in English. Jenkins found, for instance, that international students at a British university understood each other well in English and swiftly adapted to helping the least fluent members in any group. Because of that, they understand one another at face value. Non-native speakers generally use more limited vocabulary and simpler expressions, without flowery language or slang. “It’s the native English speakers that are having difficulty understanding and making themselves understood.” “Native speakers are at a disadvantage when you are in a lingua franca situation,” where English is being used as a common denominator, says Jennifer Jenkins, professor of global Englishes at the UK’s University of Southampton.
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