How to tell speakers that their English is terrible?

Question

I just had a lecture from someone who has been a senior scientist (and has completed a PhD, post-doc) at a hospital for already 15 years. So I'm assuming this person is experienced in giving talks in English. However, almost one out of three words was completely unintelligible because of a very strong Spanish accent where every word gets morphed into a Spanish-English hybrid word.

I spoke to two people after the lecture and they both said they couldn't follow along because of the strong accent. The questions after the talk were also not about the lecture but about the speaker's field. My impression is that the talk was a waste of time for the two dozen people present.

Now I wonder if the speaker is aware of this problem, my guess is no and as such I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention. If it was me I'd very much like to know that I have a problem communicating because I feel like a lack of communication skills can be a very serious barrier to being a good scientist but I don't know if she feels the same way.

My plan is to use an anonymous email address to send this feedback, sandwiched between two compliments to avoid coming off as a negative person.

Answer 1

This might be productive in a direct conversation, if you are able to establish rapport, and if you can steer the conversation in a productive direction. You could start by asking her to clarify some key point you were interested in. Stop her as soon as there's something you don't understand, and if necessary ask her to spell the word you don't understand. The goal at this point is to succeed in communicating with each other.

If you are able to accomplish that, then you could say

Thanks for clarifying that point. That is really interesting for me. I didn't understand what you said on that point during the lecture -- to tell you the truth, I was only able to get the meaning of some of what you said, and that made it hard for me to follow the arc of the presentation. I'm not very good at understanding nonstandard unfamiliar accents. So I have to rely heavily on the visual with a lot of speakers. Your slides about (topic B) helped me a lot, because they had a lot of detail.

That is a conclusion that helps the speaker move forward in a positive direction.

---

Additional notes.

Often one needs to crank up the belief in oneself in order to get through the PhD and other hurdles in academia. This sometimes leads one to a slightly Aspergeresque attitude of "I can find the words I need to express myself; mission accomplished; I'm not interested in how well other people are understanding me." Step one is to establish rapport.

Sometimes this rapport can result in the stronger English speaker having some influence over the other. Sometimes it results in the stronger English speaker getting tuned into the other's speech patterns better, and perhaps also developing empathy for what has led the other to his or her current state of mediocre English. This happened to me with respect to my advisor. For the most part I'm one of those people who finds horrible English, or horrible French, or horrible Spanish, excruciating, like chalk going the wrong way on a blackboard; and it continues to torment me later like a stuck song (ear worm). Once my empathy with my advisor was established, certain patterns, such as his tendency to omit words, got a lot less on my nerves.

---

Today I had a brainwave. If the speaker's English is that bad, the hosting department should provide an interpreter.

Answer 2

I think that your plan is based on number of possibly wrong premises. And even if they were mostly right, I doubt such a plan could have any reasonable success. Let's see my reasons.

I just had a lecture from someone who has been a senior scientist (and has completed a PhD, post-doc) at a hospital for already 15 years.So I'm assuming this person is experienced in giving talks in English.

I've met along the years many senior researchers, even native English speakers, who where definitely not experienced in giving talks, at all. If academic researchers are frequently experienced speakers because, at least, they have teaching duties, some researchers from research institutes are really "lab rats" who rarely deliver talks. To give you an example, a few years ago I was attending a poster session in a conference and I told one of the presenters (a native English speaker) that I was surprised that his work had been accepted as poster presentation and not as an oral one. He told me that it was actually accepted as oral presentation, but he asked for a poster one because he doesn't like to deliver talks.

My impression is that the talk was a waste of time for the two dozen people present.

Talks can be a waste of time for other reasons than terrible language: slides with unreadable results, talk targeted to the wrong audience etc. I certainly attended many talks that could be considered a waste of time for almost anyone in the rooms, and a large fraction of these talks were delivered by allegedly experienced speakers.

Now I wonder if the speaker is aware of this problem, my guess is no

In my experience among non-native speakers of English, most of the people is well aware of their level of English and of their pronunciation: your guess is likely wrong.

I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention.

Would you feel the same need if the talk were a waste of time for any other reason? And note that preparing readable slides is usually much easier than fixing pronunciation. And are you planning to do such an action for all the useless talks you will attend in your life?

I feel the need to bring this to the speaker's attention.

As I said, the speaker is probably well aware of this issue, but can you offer any solution that the speaker is not already aware of?

Improving pronunciation is not something that can be done easily, especially if one is not keen on languages. The speaker might have had good reasons for not having been able to improve pronunciation more than that. Time and money can be two of them. I don't know how many languages you speak -- you speak more than one, right? I speak Italian, my native language, English and French. My level of English is decent, but my level of French is basic. I cannot make great conversations in French, just short sentences, and sometimes I've been misunderstood (e.g., I once asked for a book called Rue des Maléfices and the clerk searched for Roue des Maléfices). I'd love to improve my French pronunciation because I spend most of my vacations there but, guess what, I really cannot find the time to do this. Or I'd like to learn German, because I have many German colleagues and I also found some nice physics book in German that I'd like to read without Google translator. Again, I cannot find enough time to learn German even at a basic level.

To conclude, don't.

Answer 3

Don't send the email. Based on my experience, I predict that the anonymous email you are proposing to send almost certainly won't tell the speaker any information she does not already know, only something that she is either in denial about or that she is (for whatever mysterious reasons of human psychology) helpless or unwilling to do anything about. On the other hand, especially due to its anonymous nature, the email is quite likely to come across as hurtful and to cause her negative feelings such as guilt, self-loathing, low self-esteem, depression, etc., that would make her situation worse without leading to any progress towards resolving her accent/language problem.

There is a time and a place to offer people negative feedback that might help them improve, e.g., when such feedback is directly solicited from you or when you are a person whose job it is to offer such feedback. That time and place is not your current situation. So don't.

Answer 4

Being part of an international research community means, and has always meant, a) learning the lingua franca (so to speak) of the field - some of us are lucky enough to skip this step because we were born into it - and b) learning to understand the wide range of accents that the language will necessarily be spoken in, again much simpler for us native speakers.

If because of auditory disability or "tin ear" you can't understand non-native speakers, then your ability to interact in the international community will be greatly limited. You can try only talking to locals or using only written communication, but you'd be better off trying to improve your skills through practice.

Answer 5

It's unlikely that a non-native English speaker who often interacts with native speakers is unaware that their English is difficult to understand. Do you speak another language? How would you feel if someone sent you an anonymous email informing you that you were completely incomprehensible? Especially if you already knew that people often had trouble understanding you?

On the other hand, you are correct about communication skills. Nonetheless, it's possible for someone to communicate well during a lecture or presentation despite having a difficult accent or weak skills in the target language. You might try offering feedback about how they could improve their presentation given their current language skills, but only if you know that such feedback would be constructive and welcome.

Answer 6

I agree with you that the speaker should be told. Contrary to other aspects of a talk (slides clarity, order, etc..) which are somewhat optional and left to the speaker's interest in making a good talk, intelligibility of the speech is a minimum requirement. Not taking care of this is probably hurting them badly.

Last time I attended in a very similar situation one of the more senior speakers approached the unintelligible speaker and flat out told them : "Do you know it's very hard to understand you when you speak"?. I was there and made a little joke to lighten up the comment and we walked away but the speaker most likely got the message.

So, there's one way. If you do not have the seniority required to give unrequested advices in person tho, your suggestion seems fine to me. Send an anonymous email explaining that you had a very hard time understanding the talk. Just make sure you are passing out the right message, that you are trying to make them aware of what you felt was a big issue making communication difficult and not shaming them for it.

As to what people have said in other answers :

1) the speaker might be aware of the issue, but not of its severity. This might give them the push they need to act on it. 2) there's plenty of free and little time consuming ways of improving pronunciation (movies, pre practicing talks, YouTube videos, slowing down when speaking ) 3) I don't think you are 'shaming' the , no one asks for British English in academia and accents are usually never questioned..as long as they can reasonably be understood

Answer 7

Contrary to the majority of opinions here, as a non-native speaker, I would say that an anonymous email would be helpful. It won't give you any brownie points, and may hurt the speaker's feeling, but it will be helpful to the person regardless. In general, we already give one another too few honest feedbacks out of politeness -- anything in the other direction would be a valuable change.

The most popular answer here asks: "Would you give the feedback if it were about any issue other than English?" I concede that it's not the norm to do so, but it doesn't mean that such a feedback wouldn't be helpful. Indeed, my advisor gives me feedback on the structure of my talk, its graphs, and its typos -- why not my English as well? (In fact, he does comment on when I need to slow down or fix a grammatical mistake).

The speaker may be aware that he has an issue with language, but he may not realize the extent of the problem. There's a chance that the feedback may help, and it sure can't hurt, so why not?

Granted, since you do not play the advisor role to the speaker, I would absolutely advise against a direct conversation. Most likely, it'll make the speaker feel resentful towards you, no matter how helpful your advice is. (Such is regrettably human nature). But an anonymous email would work perfectly well.

Answer 8

No, unless you are explicitly asked. You could simply look arrogant, the speaker could hate you, and the speaker's supporters could also feel resentful. Your reputation could suffer, or at least I don't see how it would grow. Moreover, criticizing the person is not your job, and anonymous feedback takes your time.

If you think you lost time while listening because of the accent, you might bring this to the attention to the host of the person or to the session chair. It's the job of the session chair, the host, the mentor, or the supervisor to provide criticism and feedback to the speaker. If you really wish to, talk to these folks personally and utmost politely; don't leave any written trail.

Answer 9

If your advice is not successfully actionable in the short-term, it may not be considered that constructive by the recipient.

So no, do not send her that feedback.

That being said, ask the organizers of the event (or the faculty in charge) to provide transcripts of the talk in advance the next time around, especially if there is any doubt about the ability of their speakers to speak English clearly.

Do not ask for the slides. The slides are designed to be incomplete (and for good reasons). What you must ask for is the transcript. And by transcript, I do not mean that the speaker should read her own transcript while giving her presentation. Reading a script, while making it sound natural, is extremely difficult.

Ideally, the speaker's own notes (the one she has on the podium) should only of consist of a few keywords and key topics that the speaker doesn't want to forget to mention during her lecture. It should not contain full sentences, let alone paragraphs. So in that sense, the lecture shouldn't match the transcript perfectly. But even when it doesn't match the lecture perfectly, a transcript for a speaker, members of the audience do not understand, can still be very useful.

Providing a transcript in advance may not be what you're used to in your academic field, but it is possible and it's actually a pretty standard practice if someone does a presentation in front of journalists (even when the speaker is a native English speaker). For journalists, supplying a transcript in advance helps catch mistakes before they get reprinted, whether the speaker makes the mistake when speaking or whether the journalist makes the mistake when quoting the spoken words of the speaker.

From the point of view of the organizers, that will require pre-screening potential speakers, by previewing previous talks, or if that's not possible, by talking to the potential speakers directly. This is also a standard practice in some Academic circles, whether the screening process is made obvious or not.

Furthermore, as a non-native English speaker myself with a pretty strong French accent, I'm suggesting that whoever does that pre-screening is a non-native English colleague with an obvious accent himself/herself.

And instead of simply rejecting a talk because the speaker has too strong of an accent, a good pre-screener should still encourage the speaker to still speak at the event, but to supply a transcript in advance at the very least (in addition to any tentative improvement to his accent or delivery), and if that transcript is not possible by a specific deadline, to reject that talk for that event.

Answer 10

I agree with the commenters that as a listener to the presentation you should probably avoid commenting on the lecturer's clarity (eg because of poor English) unless you are in very friendly and constructive terms with her.

However, I think you could still politely tell her that the presentation was interesting but you couldn't follow perfectly given the poor sound/background noise, and so you would like to receive a copy of the slideset. Then you could suggest to make the slides more self-explanatory.

Your question is more interesting however from the viewpoint of moderators or scientific committee member. In such a case, they have the explicit responsibility to the audience that lectures are clear and understandable. Otherwise, what would be the point of inviting people to lecture at all? Most importantly, a genuinely constructive feedback will be important for the lecturer himself, to avoid future embarassments.

A simple suggestion for anyone with language difficulties is to create/modify a slideset by adding as many self-explanatory phrases as possible. This creates redundancies for a competent lecturer, but saves a poor one. Eventually, such a slideset will only leave the room for poor pronunciation, but all key messages will be firmly delivered.

Answer 11

Some people either make no effort, or have strong difficulties polishing their strong accent. It might depend on the original language. For the English/American native, some people with Roman background language (as I do) fall in this category.

The state of energy of the person can play a role too: when one is sick, stressed or tired, efforts can be difficult. When I give a lecture in English, I notice that after one hour my natural accent begins to show up.

I agree that university authorities are more responsible for the add value of a lecture. Yet, if you tell them, the impact on how they will translate the issue to the lecturer might be far different, from not taking care to harsher remarks.

As your motivation stands between these two extreme options, I would avoid a written comment, perhaps even more with an anonymous email. But that might be a cultural thing; I'd prefer a direct talk, face to face if possible, in the line of your planned email, for instance to check whether the problem is the same in individual talk: thank the person, ask for the slides, pointing that due to accent-related misunderstandings, you might have lost key aspects of the talk.

Answer 12

People often resent unsolicited feedback because the person giving it doesn't recognize that truly empathetic feedback requires effort on the part of the person giving it. Constructive feedback must give a path forward for the person to correct the problem.

I would try this strategy: Purchase Mastering the American Accent for this person, and make a nice inscription:

I truly enjoyed your recent presentation, and I felt disheartened that I was unable to understand much of it. Your research is relevant to mine, and fundamentally important, so I was hoping we could find a way to improve communication. I am available any time to help you with American pronunciation and accent-if you so desire.

Sign it with your real name.

If in fact you do not care about learning from this person, then leave the issue alone.

Answer 13

Yes, you might want to send the email. I think it will have good and productive effect overall, and help the speaker further in her career a lot. Such criticism, though very unpleasant and even hurtful to hear at first, opens the opportunity to self-improvement. Your act thus shows that you do care for the speaker. Much more than a person who simply wants to minimize his or her in-comfort, shy away from confrontation and leave the speaker alone and deserted without knowing that secretly the community ignores and disdain her.

As for the fact that the email is anonymous, something that have alerted many commenters here, I disagree with the overall opinion. Academia is full of anonymous feedback, most of which has the potential to be much more hurtful and cardinal than a somewhat amusing email about one's accent. I'm sure the speaker got many harsh and brutal rejections through anonymous peer review, throughout her career, and she's not going to break down because some guy decided to write an anonymous email, peculiar as it sounds. Indeed, academia itself has reserved the right for people "not to stand behind their own opinions" and ideas, so that they feel protected to speak freely, through endless forms of anonymous feedback (reviews and student's feedback, to name a few).