Speaking English at Work as a Second Language
By Mira Lindqvist · Finding Your Voice
How can you speak English more clearly at work if it is your second language? Work on pace and pauses before accent. Research shows a strong accent and easy-to-understand speech often go together; what makes speech hard to follow is usually rushing and running words together. Slow down slightly, pause between ideas, stress the key word in each sentence, and prepare the first sentence of anything important.
Millions of people do their whole working lives in a language they learned second. Many of them worry about their accent more than anything else: in meetings, on calls, in presentations. The research suggests that worry is mostly aimed at the wrong thing.
Your accent is not what people struggle with
Murray Munro and Tracey Derwing asked native English listeners to do three things with short recordings of Mandarin speakers: write down what they heard, rate how strong the accent was, and rate how easy it was to understand.1 Most of the speech was understood well and rated easy to follow, even when the same recordings were judged strongly accented. Accent, intelligibility and the effort it takes to understand someone turned out to be different things.
That matters, because accent is the hardest of the three to change and the least important. Intelligibility and ease of understanding can be improved quickly, by habits that have nothing to do with accent.
What actually makes speech hard to follow
Speed. Under pressure, many second-language speakers speed up, often to get a sentence over with. Words run together, and the listener has less time to work out each one.
No pauses. Pauses are where a listener catches up. A speaker who pauses between ideas gives the listener time to process the last one before the next arrives.
Flat stress. English relies heavily on stressing the important word in a sentence. When every word gets the same weight, the listener has to work harder to find the point. What a monotone voice costs explains why.
Long sentences. A long, complex sentence in a second language is hard to say and hard to follow. Two short sentences are easier on both of you.
The credibility problem is real, and smaller than it feels
There is a harder finding too. Shiri Lev-Ari and Boaz Keysar asked listeners to judge trivia statements read aloud by native and non-native speakers, and the same statements were rated less likely to be true when read with a foreign accent, even though listeners knew the speakers were only reading lines written by someone else.2 The authors traced it to the extra effort accented speech takes to process.
The practical answer is the same as above: anything that makes your speech easier to process (pace, pauses, stress, short sentences) also reduces this penalty. You do not need to lose your accent. You need to make the listener's job easy.
Habits that help at work
- Prepare the first sentence of anything important: the opening of a presentation, the point you want to make in a meeting. The first sentence is the hardest to produce under pressure, and once it is out the rest follows more easily.
- Use the words your field uses. Technical vocabulary is often easier in a second language than small talk, because you use it every day. Lean on it.
- Ask for what you need. "Could you say that again a little more slowly?" is a normal request in a multilingual workplace, and native speakers often do not realise how fast they talk.
- Check understanding without apologising. "Let me say that another way" is stronger than "sorry, my English".
- Write after you speak. A short follow-up email after an important conversation catches anything that was misheard on either side.
Getting into the conversation in meetings
Many second-language speakers find meetings harder than presentations, because the conversation moves fast and the gap to come in closes before the sentence is ready. Three habits help. Prepare one point before the meeting and say it early, before the discussion speeds up. Use a short bridge to take the floor ("Can I add something here?") and then pause, which gives you a moment to form the sentence. And if someone else makes your point first, say so and build on it: "That's what I was going to say, and I'd add one thing." You are in the conversation, and nobody will notice the point arrived second.
On calls and video
Phone and video calls remove the lip-reading and gestures that help listeners in a room, so the habits above matter even more. Speak a little more slowly than in person, pause slightly longer, and confirm key numbers and dates in writing in the chat.
Practise with a recording
Record yourself giving a two-minute update in English, then listen for one thing only: where you rushed, or where you did not pause. Fix that one thing and record it again. Why your accent is not the problem goes further into the research, and how to sound professional when you speak covers the habits that matter in any language.
References
- Munro, M. J., & Derwing, T. M. (1995). Foreign Accent, Comprehensibility, and Intelligibility in the Speech of Second Language Learners. Language Learning, 45(1), 73–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1995.tb00963.x
- Lev-Ari, S., & Keysar, B. (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2010.05.025