Job Discussion Forums

[gtd]

Hi all, I'm very new to china and teaching ESL in general. i've been here 3 weeks and I have a new student (one on one). the student is a 32 year old chinese woman who works for an international business. her english is exceptional and she has very little problems understanding myself (i'm canadian) however the reason she came to my school is because she has a very hard time understanding the accents of her co-workers. her boss is french and she works with germans, mexicans, indians, russians, and czechs. she has the most problems understanding indian and mexican speakers. I'm having a really hard time trying to design a lesson plan for her as i haven't found many resources for her specific need. If anyone has any pointers or tips it would be greatly appreciated!

[spiral78]

I'm not in China and have taught only a few Chinese students over the years. However, I've spent nearly 14 years now working with German,Czech, French, and Russian speakers in international situations (along with a few Indians and Mexicans thrown in on occasion) so I might be able to speak to your situation.

As you're aware, the problem will be that it's little short of impossible to reconcile a soup of different Englishes so that any single person will instantly understand them all. It's quite likely that you or I wouldn't immediately understand all the speakers your student is working with!!

So:

I would work on giving her some clarification and confirmation techniques that she can use when she doesn't understand the English of others.

For example, you can remind her of and practice phrases and functions:

Confirming:

Ok, if I understand correctly, you mean .................................
Yes, you want me to ...........................
Good. You will .............................

(There are other phrases that work for this function)

Asking for repetition:

Sorry, I didn't quite catch that. Could you run it by me again?
Pardon?
(there are many more phrases that work for this function)

Restatement request (when she doesn't understand the meaning of a word/phrase)

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you put that another way?
What does ..... mean?
I understand ........... but I'm not sure about ........... Can you describe it for me?

You can also work with her to strengthen her own communication skills in international situations. She can use techniques like summarising or asking questions to be sure that others understand her clearly - it's difficult sometimes to discern where the chain of misunderstanding begins.

Summarising can be done quite simply at frequent points in a conversation or meeting or presentation or whatever:

So, the main point is.....
Great, we've agreed to .......
Ok, you want me to ......

(and many more).

Later on, if she's pinpointed the Mexicans and Indians for certain, you could use online pronunciation resources for speakers of those languages (from those regions, in the case of India) to analyze with your student the main ways the pronunciation is different. With Mexicans, it's mostly about vowel sounds, and with Indians, it's primarily intonation and word/sentence stresses. Understanding what is going on with their pronunciation may help her understand them better, though it hardly seems fair she should need to spend much time studying the pronunciation problems of others, as she herself sounds like a fairly successful learner! Still, she might enjoy and benefit from a bit of such study....

Enjoy the student - this sounds like a pretty rewarding person to work with!

[Miles Smiles]

gtd,

What spiral has told you is really the best way for anyone to conduct a business conversation with anyone whose native language is not one's own, whether he understands the accent or not. It's excellent business procedure.

I've seen only one Chinese business English textbook that addressed this problem. Spiral nailed it. Great advice.

[Non Sequitur]

I agree. Spiral's approach is about all you can do.
Indians in particular will not be unfamiliar with requests to repeat what they've said. No offence to my many friends from the sub continent.
I would add 'reassurance' to the toolkit prepared for your student. She is far from alone.
This situation will become more and more common as non-native to non-native English communication becomes more widespread.
Call centre operators located in India are coached in accent neutralisation techniques and that could be something your student's employer might like to look into for the whole organisation. Sounds like a Tower of Babel situation there now.
Resist the temptation to standardise on American-accented English.

[The Great Wall of Whiner]

Chinese are not very tolerant of other dialects and accents. This is because Mandarin speakers will tell you that there is only ONE WAY to speak Mandarin and no room for flexibility. Whereas in English, we are far more used to listening to all sorts of different accents. Tameito, tahmahto... doesn't matter how I say this word to an English-speaker. It is universally recognized and accepted. I have certain methods for getting Chinese-English learners out of the narrow-minded "only one way" mentality, but that was after a decade of working on it.

Good luck. Best option is to explain to her that she has to get used to listening for the consonants and not the vowels, because those are the biggest differences in regional accents.

Ask an Aussie/Kiwi what I'm talking about when I say "fush 'n chups / feesh 'n cheeps"...