Poland: Teaching non-native speakers business English

I went for a run this morning in the hotel grounds

We’re situated in the north-east of Poland, not so far from the border with Lithuania, by a beautiful lake. In the shade of the trees the air held a chill, but still the sun shone brightly, and soon I was sweating and glad I’d left my jacket back in my room.

We had breakfast. A buffet of cold meat, salad and bread. I had coffee and muesli, which oddly had chunks of chocolate in it. I’m not normally a chocolate at breakfast kind of girl, but neither am I a ham sandwich person.

Then I met up with my mentee

She’s working on a presentation which she’s going to be giving tomorrow on the salty snacks industry. I coached her for the hour. She’s nervous of course, but she knows what she’s talking about and she’s going to do just fine.

Then I found myself a mug of hot water with a few slices of lemon. I need to take care of my voice. And went outside with a lawyer who needed my assistance practicing negotiation. A lawyer who has taught lawyers, and who employs lawyers and who needed my help. We sat on a bench in the sunshine to discuss the situation. We covered potential problems of high unemployment, the challenges of persuading young people to stick around in a town with few job opportunities, and developed the arguments that he would need to negotiate with a farmer’s alliance for gain support for the building of a new supermarket which the farmer’s alliance were dead against.

At one, I took a break

A few of us hired bikes and went for a ride, picking up essentials from the village shop, like chocolate.

Then time for lunch: beetroot soup which, like cucumber soup, is apparently a very traditional meal, followed by roast chicken and buckwheat groats. With an accompanying conversation about jellyfish.

And now, with my tummy full, I have an hour or two of time to get on with my own work. Soon though, I must return to the conference room and begin a session on telephone conversation. With my wonderful accent this will be an excellent listening test for the people I’m coaching.

Teaching, coaching, mentoring, listening

This is how I’m spending my week in the sunshine and I am learning so much.

The Netherlands: And the King’s birthday celebrations

king's day
The streets were crowded with people and their unwanted belongings. King’s day is the only day when it’s legal for anyone to be a street seller.

Looking out of the apartment window, on the evening of the 26th April in the Netherlands, I could see teenage boys in hoodies washing the street. This is not quite as friendly or community minded as it sounds. The marks they were washing away were the names of other Dutch children. The territorial battle ready for the day ahead: the king’s birthday.

So the next morning, I awoke to the sound of young girls singing American cheerleading songs. I assumed they were also dancing, but they were down on the street, and I was up in the apartment sleeping so I couldn’t see.

So why a territorial battle and cheerleaders?

The 27th April is King’s Day. Or at least that’s what the English language marketing calls it. It’s the celebration of the Dutch King’s birthday. There’s occasionally some confusion with tourists as for a long-time Queen’s Day was on the 30th April and older guide books will quote this date. To make matters more confusing, the 30th April wasn’t really the Queen’s birthday, it was her mother’s birthday. The Queen’s actual birthday is mid-winter, but moving the festivities from the end of April (where they had been previously) to mid-winter wouldn’t have been good for a celebration that typically takes place out on the streets.

Suitably prepared, I wore my orange dress

Which was borrowed of course, because orange is not a participant in my wardrobe. By the time I’d dressed and eaten my breakfast, the cheerleaders had run out of puff. Their chanting gave way to the quaint tune of the barrel organ.

Meanwhile, the children who weren’t pom-pom aficionados had brought out their old toys, clothes and other belongings and were flogging them to one another.

king's day
You had to walk slowly through the streets to marvel at the contents of people’s lives.

King’s day is the only day where anyone can sell stuff on the street

People crowded the streets. I cooed over Spot books by Eric Hill (I learnt to draw by copying pictures of Spot – Dribble in Dutch). And saw a pair of old fashioned ice skating blades. The sort you tie to the base of your boots.

If you wanted kitchen equipment, old videos or a satellite dish, you could have found what you were looking for. It was like a car-boot sale on mats on the street.

A girl arduously playing her cello impressed me. I tossed her a few coins to keep her spirits up. She played well, and for the briefest of moments, I wanted a go.

Mostly though, the displays made me think of all my excess belongings

Many of which I haven’t touched for a decade. I can’t help but think I might have got something out of trying to sell them when I was younger in such a fashion. There’s got to be some good bargaining and money management skills learnt in such an environment. And I liked that the children were both benefiting and working for their toys.

But most of all, I liked that in a culture where throwing stuff away is the easy norm, this second-hand stuff was getting a new leash of life.

What toys and games could you put on your mat?

Books I finished reading in April

books
They say never judge a book by its cover, but I have to disagree.

No Matter The Wreckage: Poems by Sarah Kay

Borrowed from the Midget.

Sarah Kay writes and speaks poetry. I read her poems, sometimes in my head, sometimes in a whisper, occasionally aloud, before falling asleep in the evenings. They’re playful, but sometimes melancholic. The words twist and dance. They’re not following rules and there’s no rhyming scheme I understand. But all the same, they’re picture painting.

My favourite is one called ‘Dragons’. I don’t know why.

I’d read more of her work. It’s comforting.

Contagious: Why things Catch On by Jonah Berger

Library book.

A very general kind of book about what causes us to share ideas. It’s marketing in a breezy conversation with psychology. Between them they’ve agreed on some concepts and come up with some ideas.

The premise is if you want someone to think about something, you’ve got to show them the idea in the first place, and then you’ve got to continue to trigger it, again and again. The idea must appear to have worth to the individual – it makes them look good or allows them to provide genuine help to someone whose opinion they care about (makes them look good). The best packaging for a message, surprise surprise, is a story. Fairy tales and religious texts have been selling their morals and lessons for ages. But it also helps if the message is specific and individual. It has more power if it feels exclusive, unique, important, special… Exclusivity, ‘sale’, this week only…

Just a bit of light reading. Not particularly recommendable, but not a worthless read either.

One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It’s not mine, but nor I don’t know whose it is…

This is a good book, a well-written book. An easy to consume, eye-opening, descriptive but constantly on the move book. It’s an account of one day of one prisoner’s labour camp jail sentence based on the author’s own experiences. The details bring it alive.

It’s not a depressing though as I imagined.

It’s a book that makes you question your own materialism. Solzhenitsyn makes you pause before you next eat. You find yourself looking a little closer at the plate in front of you, piled high and hot. This book has a horrible backdrop, but explores the uncomfortable setting through the delights of a puff on a cigarette, or an extra 20 grams of bread. For the protagonist to dwell on the horror of the circumstances he’s in, would be overwhelming. It goes unwritten, and is saved for the reader to feel when they step back and compare the comfort of one day in their own life to the hardship of one day like that.

Would recommend.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

Borrowed from the Mother, who apparently bought it in a jumble sale, before she was married, according to the name inscribed in the front, but who has never read it.

It’s not my first Evelyn Waugh book. I read and enjoyed Scoop some years ago. Knowing I liked the author’s writing and having heard the name of the book a few times, I thought Brideshead Revisited would be a good read for me.

Now, I can’t disagree that it’s a good book, but I can’t claim to like it. In a way, I think the emotional journey through it was too close to my own emotions and my own frustrations, even if the actual story and characters are nothing like my life. Maybe that’s the mark of good literature, that it gives a different way of looking and feeling something that’s inherently the same.

But, frustratingly, nor do I dislike the book. I just don’t like the feelings it induces in me. There’s a hollowness it conveys, which is uncomfortable. And the reasoning, like so much of my own reasoning, is circular and blown out of perspective. It doesn’t make sense. But I know how it feels to have life not making sense around you. Damn frustrating.

How to boost your vocabulary (without getting in a tangle)

conditioner as context
Sometimes the tangles look huge and overwhelming, but with a little help, things can soon get back to neat and smooth.

“You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.”

My mum used to despair at how tangled my hair would get when I was little. Both me and my little sister have great volumes of hair. So much that it even amazed the hairdresser. It’s long, mostly straight, but comes at you from every angle. After an hour or two of playing in the garden it did look like we’d been dragged through a hedge backwards.

It used to get into the most dreadful knots.

I remember my mum lecturing my dad on the importance of using conditioner

After giving us our baths one evening, and sending the first of us downstairs to have our freshly washed hair combed, my dad thought he had done a good job. That was until my mum tried combing our hair.  My dad had not used any conditioner and so the dry, rough hairs matted together. However, hard my mum tugged, the comb wouldn’t go through.

We returned to the bathroom, and with a dollop of gloopy conditioner she smoothed the hairs, making them less likely to catch on one another. Finally, she could untangle our hair.

Conditioner was not optional in our family. It was essential for pain-free combing.

But how can we apply these principles for pain-free language learning?

Context is the extra gloop you need so new vocabulary lays smoothly in your mind

Unless we have context, all that vocabulary becomes knotted. You’ll have words you know you know but can’t remember, and words you know but are meaningless because you have no idea of what they mean.

As we get more proficient learning, we tend to start thinking that we’re cleverer than we once were. We repeat a word a few times in our heads and imagine that we’re just going to remember it. We rarely do. Instead, the words that stick are those that we feel something about, the ones we’ve used, the ones we have associated with other ideas.

Which is why learning with context matters

However, context is not simply a matter of learning all the words to do with the beach in Tuesday afternoon’s class and words to do with a hospital all in Friday morning’s class. And it’s often impractical to go to the beach or the hospital for a language lesson.

Instead, sometimes you need to play pretend

If the vocabulary is about going to the beach, then perhaps pack your bag and get ready for a beach trip, noting the vocabulary you’re coming across as you engage with the items. These items can become a show and tell game. Everyone has a story about a time they visited a hospital. How many of the words you’re learning can you fit into your story?

Perhaps a brief account of that time you went to the beach, when your son was stung by a jellyfish, had an allergic reaction and ended up in the accident and emergency department. Use props.

Does it feel a little childish?

Probably. Sitting behind a desk and writing words on a piece of paper is often easier than acting a story. There’s less chance you’ll look foolish. I don’t say it lightly. I’d take silent reading over charades any day. However, if you watch children playfully learning to speak a language, it’s hard not to be jealous of how they adapt.

Moving around in role-play (games of mummy, daddy and baby dolly for example), drawing pictures and singing songs might seem childish, but children do these things because it’s how they learn.

We learn in three distinct ways

Kinaesthetic learning is about doing. This means lying down on the floor and pretending to sunbathe. Having a make-believe conversation with a friend in which you argue about the price of an ice-cream, with one person playing the role of vendor, and the other playing the role of sunburnt tourist.

Visual learning is about pictures. Photos are great because they refer to specific memories. But making a collage from magazines (or a travel brochure), drawing pictures, doodling and watching videos all helps.

Auditory learning is about hearing. What television adverts can you find telling you to visit so and so country. Or look up adverts for package holidays or airlines. But even small things help, like putting on a recording of the sea, gentle sloshing waves, or squawking seagulls and children crying.

There are many online tests to work out your predominant learning strategy, but you will learn through all three methods, and it’s worth using them all if you can.

All these small context prompts act like conditioner

They organise the vocabulary in your mind, allowing you to move through the words to find what you’re looking for. It stops you getting stuck on the wrong word, instead you can think of others and keep up the momentum. Like the comb sliding through the hair. Finally, you land on, if not the perfect word, something you can use.

With a little bit of context to help organise your brain, your mind won’t feel like it’s been dragged through a hedge backwards.

Summary

  1. Textbook learning can tie us in knots. We end up knowing a lot of words, but not necessarily what they mean. Or we can’t reach them, quickly, from our memories.
  2. Building a context helps us integrate the words into our minds.
  3. The building blocks for context building are the visual, kinaesthetic and audio cues that we learn from.

Sometimes it’s worth getting creative about how you find your context

When I first learnt Italian numbers, it was after a glass of wine (or two) during a game of monopoly. The Italian young men whom I was playing with had no qualms about stealing from each other. They would lie openly about who owed whom what amount. And, when convenient, pretending not to understand English.

Determined that the Italians wouldn’t swindle me. I learnt to count my lira, make demands and gesture in wild Italian. It was playful, fun and hard work. Sentences were beyond me, but even a few weeks later, I could order whatever weight of salami Milano I wanted from the butcher. I had all my numbers.

Have fun with your language learning.


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Article written by Catherine Oughtibridge.

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How to use a teacher’s trick to improve your fluency (Even if you fear speaking)

cold corrections
How do you feel when someone puts you on the spot with a question?

Have you ever found that the words and phrases you’ve worked hard to learn disappear when you need them?

A question. You hear it. Perhaps you understand some of it, but haven’t got a full translation. There’s no sound coming from your lips. Your brain stretches to find the right words, but finds nothing. Time passes. Your cheeks begin to redden.

You feel like a novice.

It isn’t fair, you’ve worked hard

All that time sat behind your desk. The audiobooks you listen to in the car. The TV programmes you watch even though most of the time you’re not entirely sure what’s happening. You’ve done the studying, practiced the grammar, learnt your set phrases and yet, faced with a native speaker, you have nothing to say.

Well, it’s not just you

Speaking often comes up as a top cause of anxiety – even with people speaking in their own language. The biggest reason for this is that people believe that others are going to see them shaking, nervous and incoherent and think, what a fool.

Furthermore, when you’re speaking in a language you’re learning, you’re guaranteed to make mistakes, and unless your culture is greatly different from the British attitude that making mistakes is embarrassing, then you’re going to be uncomfortable with that reality.

You don’t need to apologise

Native English speakers tend to be insecure about speaking foreign languages. The truth is we rarely need to do it. In business, English is often the language of choice, and for the unsure tourist, many restaurants, hotels and tour guides cater specifically for the English-speaking market. Us native speakers have it easy.

The moment you apologise for speaking imperfect English, you’re bound to hear a hurried reassurance. Your English is probably much better than the native speaker’s ability to speak any language other than their own.

When I tell people their English is good, what I often mean is that it’s better than my French.

In classrooms, there’s often more emphasis on grammar than speaking

And if your English reading and writing is better than your speaking, you start to feel a gap. Not surprisingly, this makes you feel more frustrated every time you speak. What’s more, you’re acutely aware of grammatical mistakes because this has been what you’ve focused on.

Now grammar’s important. Things like articles, prepositions and tenses are necessary for sounding fluent. However, if you don’t say anything, you won’t get any message across.

In teaching, there’s a technique of using hot or cold corrections

A hot correction is made the instant the mistake is heard. You’d be stopped by the teacher and have to correct your speech there and then. This style of making corrections is useful for rehearsing a set speech, or making progress in grammatical correctness.

A cold correction happens later. The emphasis is put on letting the student speak, and continue speaking. Making corrections like this is the best way to encourage fluency.

How can you internalise this technique?

First, decide for yourself that you’re going to use cold corrections. Make sure you recognise that your goal is flowing speech, not perfect speech. Give yourself permission to make mistakes.

When you’re speaking, don’t seek out correction. If someone seems overly concerned with correcting you every time you forget an article or mispronounce a word, politely ask them to remember your biggest mistakes and tell you once you’ve finished speaking. If necessary, explain that you’re trying to focus on flow. Or that their corrections make it difficult for you to think.

Perhaps it sounds counter-intuitive to avoid corrections

But by putting taking the pressure off speaking perfectly, you’re getting more words said. By speaking quickly, even if what you end up saying doesn’t make sense, you’re saying words which must be better than silent blushing. It’s also going to sound and feel more natural.

As an experiment, listen to what goes on in your brain when you’re having a conversation in your own language. You aren’t second guessing yourself are you? And the words that you speak, I bet they’re not said with perfect grammar. Mine certainly aren’t.

To summarise:

  1. Speaking is terrifying for many people. Even people speaking in their own language. When we’re speaking we tend to worry about making mistakes and looking silly.
  2. When teaching spoken English there are two types of correction that can be make: hot and cold corrections. Teaching your internal critic to use cold corrections will improve your fluency.
  3. By taking the pressure off to be perfect, you can say more. Even if what comes out isn’t grammatically correct, or quite understood, it’s progress on saying nothing at all.

But just so you know, it’s not just you. I’ve had conversations in French where I’ve been lost after one question (a question like ‘do you like France’) and said nothing at all. Yet on other occasions I’ve managed to explain travelling to Egypt to a room full of French people without correctly conjugating a single verb.

Both scenarios left me feeling flustered. But the second left me more confident too.


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You can share the whole text of the article as it is, without changes. You can’t pick and choose this paragraph or that paragraph, this doodle or that doodle, you may only use the article and document as a whole. Furthermore, you can’t make commercial gain out of it. You’re more than welcome to print off and share this article within your business, such as for team discussions or with a friend.

When sharing any of the content listed on this page, you must include the following text:

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Article written by Catherine Oughtibridge.

Curious as to where this article came from? For more tips on learning English head over to happenence.co.uk where you can enjoy other articles and free resources.

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How to be understood speaking English (without mastering the ‘th’ sounds)

pronunciation
It probably bothers you a lot more than it bothers me if you can’t pronounce my name.

Do you sometimes say something in English and get no response?

You’re faced with a blank stare. Frantically, you search through your cluttered brain trying to work out what you said wrong. Was it the verb? Was it conjugated wrong? Did you say something inappropriate by accident? You’re not sure, but she’s looking at you, waiting.

You open your mouth and feel each syllable as it passes through your lips. They sound awkward and forced. It’s no good. The listener doesn’t understand, and you were so sure you were saying it right.

So where were you going wrong?

Pronunciation is as much a listening skill as a speaking skill.

The listener repeats the exact same word that you were saying. And you’re confused because you think you’re hearing the same sounds as you’re saying, but you’re not, not quite. All languages have certain sounds which really matter to understanding.

Without the ‘th’, I’m Caterine, Caterina, Catrina or something else entirely

Whenever I meet someone on my travels, we have a short awkward conversation where I introduce my name, and they reply, “Caterine?”

“No, not quite, Ca-the-rine”

“Caterine?”

“-Th- Catherine.” Eventually I just smile saying that it’s close enough.

But it’s just like me rolling my ‘r’s

Imagine you’re having dinner with a Catalonian family. Beside you, at the table is a five-year-old girl called Carla. That’s Ca-RRRRR-la. And every time you correct anyone on their lacking ‘th’, she challenges you to say her name.

“Ca-r-la?”

“No!” she laughs, “Ca-RRRRRRRRR-la.”

Being unable to roll the ‘r’ used to get me really annoyed

Until a kindly French lady pointed out that if I said an ‘r’ sound, as strongly as I could, the French would understand me, on one condition… That when speaking French, I get my stresses correct.

Stress matters much more in French than in English

Which made me think, if stress is the keystone to being understood in French, what really matters in the other languages I’m faced with. And when I’m teaching people English pronunciation, what do I need to focus on?

Like the French R, the frustrating English ‘th’ sound isn’t as big a deal as it’s often made out to be

In fact, if you’re speaking English to a non-native speaker, you shouldn’t get overly concerned with it. In International English, the flow of your communication is much more important than the irritating ‘th’.

Just imagine it, a French man speaking to a Spanish woman, neither of whom can really hear or speak the ‘th’ like an English native, what does it matter?

And most native speakers who work with people who speak English as a second language won’t have a problem understanding your trees to sometimes be threes. That you fink rather than think will merely go down as a quirk in your accent.

The ‘th’ matters so little that the Irish have totally mangled it

Which isn’t saying that I have any idea what an Irish person talking to another Irish person is saying. But I do understand when they start trying to communicate with me – and it’s not because they have switched to ‘standard English’. They still carry their own accents, but the exuberance is muted.

Furthermore, there’s a town near where I grew up, called Barnsley

Barnsley isn’t far from when I grew up. It’s in the same county as I was taught Shakespeare. We have the same blue bus stops. But if one Barnsley lad speaks to another Barnsley lad, I’ve got about as much hope of understanding them as Carla.

Yet, like the Irish, if they want to be understood, they can make themselves understood

You don’t have to speak English like David Attenborough to have a meaningful conversation. I never have and never will. To speak ‘standard’ English would be a betrayal of my identity.

Which brings us to another problem with speaking English to a native speaker. A problem you don’t get with people who use the language as a common language, a lingua franca

English people speak awful English

At least, if you compare them to the idealized language of politicians educated at Eton and Oxford, or David Attenborough. English people speak English with dialects that vary from town to town.

But that’s the beauty of the language. It’s a mongrel tongue, ever-changing, ever abused, ever flourishing. It’s not perfection, and nor should you treat it like such.

If your goal is to get business done with an international audience

Then don’t get hung up on the ‘th’. Put your energy into the length of your vowels (still/steal, till/teal).

And those tricky consonant clusters, where every consonant (unless it’s silent) matters in making the word have meaning (stop, strop)

And when you come across an unintelligible native speaker, remember, it’s likely they don’t speak ‘standard English’ either.

Listen, and enjoy it.


A helpful hint about copyright. These resources can be used under a CC BY-NC-ND International Licence.

You can share the whole text of the article as it is, without changes. You can’t pick and choose this paragraph or that paragraph, this doodle or that doodle, you may only use the article and document as a whole. Furthermore, you can’t make commercial gain out of it. You’re more than welcome to print off and share this article within your business, such as for team discussions or with a friend.

When sharing any of the content listed on this page, you must include the following text:

©2017 Happenence Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Article written by Catherine Oughtibridge.

Curious as to where this article came from? For more tips on learning English head over to happenence.co.uk where you can enjoy other articles and free resources.

Contact Happenence Ltd. if you have further licensing questions.