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.
No comments:
Post a Comment