Speaking in English (not your first language) to an English speaking audience

You’re an experienced presenter in your own language, you have a working vocabulary of over 20,000 words, you can improvise, answer questions, use metaphor, jokes and the vernacular, what do you do when you’re faced with an audience of native English speakers?

That little voice in your head can start you thinking all of those negative things that will undermine you if you let them. Let's look at three of them for a start-

Thought 1-

“They’ll think I’m stupid with my foreign accent and limited vocabulary…”

It’s most likely that they won’t think you’re stupid because the likelihood is that as native English speakers they won’t speak a foreign language at all. They’ll think you’re rather clever, actually.

Thought 2-

“I’ll sound stupid with my greatly reduced vocabulary.”

You definitely won’t sound stupid using simple words and language. It’s one of the keys to powerful speech. As George Orwell said of great writing- “Never use a long word where a short word will do.” If you lack technical or business vocaublary in English, then that’s easy to work on with a newspaper and a dictionary, but no one will notice if you say “Yes” in answer to a question instead of “in all probability, that will be what we will do going forward”.

Thought 3-

“My accent will stop them from understanding what I’m saying”.

This might be true but is easily put right. Speaking to be understood is a complex mix of language, vocabulary, grammar, accent, diction and articulation, sometimes made more difficult by the subject about which you’re talking. Some people with a strong ‘foreign’ accent are difficult to understand, but only because they tend to talk to quickly.

Why do they talk too quickly? Because they don’t pronounce the consonants at the end of their words and they don’t follow the ‘punctuation’ of the phrases, sentences, and paragraphs of their speech. So, if you want to be understood by the 34 different nationalities in the room say,

”To be, (comma/pause) or not to be? (comma/pause), That is the question. (full stop/pause).

Not “tobeornotobethaisvequesyun”.

It’s just the same for English native speakers trying to be understood in Argentina or Zambia, miss the end consonants and the punctuation and you’ll be hard to understand by people not used to hearing English spoken ‘live’.

Speaking to International audiences

I've spent 15 years or so travelling the world and talking to thousands of people in the course of my work and I've learned some interesting and painful lessons about English as the lingua franca of international business. It's also a real niche area of work for me now as there are hundreds of companies all over Europe expanding into new territories where English speaking is the norm, and they have little experience of it as pitchers, writers and presenters. In a global market, with an international audience, there are 3 distinct scenarios to be thought about, and they are-

1. Using English when it's not your first language to present to a business audience of English speakers
   
2. Speaking in English to an audience for whom English is not the first language
   
3. Using English when it's not your first language and it's not the audience's first language either
   

Each of the three scenarios have their different challenges for the person at the front of the room and over the next few days we'll look for lesons to learn for each of them. For each we'll look at what you need to do to be understood, and that will include advice on presentation structure, visual aids, articulation and language.