Better Communication Can Begin with Native-born Speakers – Part 5

Ah, the perils of depending on Spell Check!  What a great tool…it does so much.  But what it doesn’t do is catch words that are real words, spelled correctly, but used inappropriately.  Check out the poem below to see what I mean.  Read it aloud to yourself and you’ll see what I mean!

SPELL CHECKER BLUE IT!

I HAVE A SPELLING CHECKER,

IT CAME WITH MY PC;

IT PLAINLY MARKS FOUR MY REVUE

MISTAKES I CANNOT SEA.

I'VE RUN THIS POEM THREW IT,

I'M SURE YOUR PLEASE TO NO,

ITS LETTER PERFECT IN IT'S WEIGH.

MY CHECKER TOLLED ME SEW.

- CHARLYNN MAXWELL PORTER

   GATLINBURG, TENN.

Better Communication Can Begin with Native-born Speakers – Part 4

I’d like to share the following excerpt from an article I found fascinating:

A Failure to Communicate

By PAMELA PAUL

Published: August 27, 2010

THE GIST Many Americans are wary of people who speak with foreign accents.

 

THE SOURCE “Why Don’t We Believe Non-Native Speakers? The Influence of Accent On Credibility,” The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

 

ZERE ees a reason ze villain alvays speaks like zees. But it may not be the reason you think. A new study says distrust of those who speak with a foreign accent goes beyond common xenophobia. Apparently, when we don’t understand what someone’s saying, we lose confidence in the speaker altogether.

According to recent research, words and pictures that we can process easily — ones that we don’t have to work to decipher — tend to be perceived as not only more pleasant, clearer and less risky, but also more truthful.

Better Communication Can Begin with Native-born speakers – Part 3

In my last blog, I used the term SLOW DOWN.  As I wrote that, I couldn’t help but think how odd that we say SLOW DOWN, but SPEED UP.  Why do we ask people if they’d like to COME OVER…..over what?  Are we flying?  Why do we LOOK SOMETHING UP but WRITE SOMETHING DOWN?  But then, you get WRITTEN UP when something is put into your personnel file.

What’s the point of this?  Be aware that when you speak to someone who did not grow up here, these inconsistencies can cause confusion.  We need to understand that English is a difficult and sometimes crazy language and be tolerant when our usage of some expressions can cause communication problems.

Better Communication Can Begin with Native-born speakers – Part 2

The other day I was speaking on the phone with one of our ServSafe instructors, a native speaker of Mandarin.  For the first time since I’ve known her, I had difficulty grasping the details of the conversation and found myself asking for a repetition.  Knowing how unpleasant it is to have to repeat things, I spent some time after the call thinking about what I could have done to make the call go better.  The first thing I realized is that all my prior communication with her had been in-person.  I remembered how my grandmother used to say she couldn’t hear well without her glasses.  Aha!  When we can look at someone and see their facial and body expressions, we have many non-verbal clues as to the content of the message.  Take these away and communication is diminished substantially.  Add to that the static generated by any electronic communication and the result can be dismal, not to mention inaccurate!

What can we do?  The most significant thing a native English speaker (especially those of us from the NY metro area) is to SLOW DOWN.  Removing the ‘’video’’ makes us depend more on the ‘’audio.’’  Be aware that your listener must ‘’decode’’ what you say and needs to hear each individual word with enough space between them to process the information.  If listeners get ‘’stopped’’ by not understanding one phrase, they may not be able to catch up and may miss the content of the remainder of the sentence.  Speak twice as slowly as you normally speak when speaking to a foreign-born individual on the phone.  You may think you are speaking painfully slowly, but your listener will be very grateful.

Better Communication Can Begin With The Native Born Speaker

The many years I have been working with foreign born speakers of American English have led me to reflect that we work so much to help them to communicate with native born speakers yet work so little on helping these native born speakers to be better understood by their foreign born audience.  I'd like to devote the next few blog entries to doing this, as I truly believe that better communication must be attempted from both sides to be effective.  These tips are aimed at the American born side of the equation.  Put your own daily chatter under the microscope and by increasing awareness, you might just increase the level of understanding when you speak to someone who did not grow up speaking American English.

American sports analogies:  have you ever noticed how often we use them in our daily speech?  "He hit a home run with that proposal (baseball)." "She did an end run to go around her supervisor (football). " "That was a slam-dunk (basketball).  You'll realize how many times we do this when you monitor your own dialog.....and when you see the blank expression of your foreign born listener. 

Nonsense expressions that have no significance if you didn't grow up here:

Think about how many times we use expressions like "willy-nilly, hanky-panky, and wishy-washy" and how puzzling they might be to others.  Simple efforts to avoid using these expressions can go a long way towards understanding. Instead, you can use real words to describe the same thing...say "erratic, bad behavior, and vague" to better convey your meaning.

Jargon:  We all tend to use the jargon and terminology specific to our line of work.  It's helpful to be aware that outside of that industry, use of these words and expressions can be puzzling to an "outsider." As a training provider, I often hear expressions in the Human Resources environment that I didn't understand at first.  Was "on boarding" something like "water-boarding?" What is a "matrix?" You get the idea.  Being aware of jargon and either defining it or using more commonly understood words will help to make the listener not feel stupid.  Remember that most people will not feel comfortable asking about an unfamiliar word or expression.

Simple attention to our own speech and phraseology goes a long way toward making a listener from another culture feel at ease in a business discussion.