the room where nobody speaks English as a first language

A call that works

Let us imagine it. It is late afternoon in Kochi, morning in São Paulo, mid-morning in Hamburg, evening in Osaka. Four people are settling the specification for a component that will be made in Japan, bought in Germany, designed partly in Brazil and tested in India.

The engineer from Kochi opens. He speaks a little slower than he would in Malayalam, and he says the number twice: "The tolerance is zero point two. Zero point two millimetres." The product lead from Brazil asks, "So, for you, this is final, or we can discuss?" The German buyer answers with a single clear sentence about cost. The Japanese supplier pauses, then repeats back what she has understood, item by item, before saying yes to two of the three points.

Nobody uses an idiom. Nobody says "let's circle back" or "that's a bit of a curveball". Every number gets confirmed. Every decision gets said aloud. The call ends early.

This is an illustration, not a report of a real call. But anyone who works across borders will recognise it. We hear versions of it constantly from the professionals we coach, often with the same note of surprise: "It was easier than when the client from London joined."

Why the room works

We think the shared-second-language room works for a simple reason: everyone in it knows that being understood is not automatic. So everyone works at it.

People slow down without being asked. They choose the common word over the clever one. They check. They repeat numbers, dates and names. They summarise before they agree. They leave a little more room after each turn, because they know the other person may be translating, and they would want the same courtesy.

There is also an unspoken equality. Nobody owns the language. Nobody is the referee of correct English. A slightly unusual phrase from the Brazilian lead is not a mistake to be noticed; it is just how he says it, and everyone moves on. The pressure to perform English drops, and the energy goes into the actual work.

What happens when a native speaker joins

Now let the call get a fifth guest: a project director whose first language is English. She is friendly, quick and sharp. And something shifts.

The pace goes up. The jokes arrive. "Let's not boil the ocean." "We're not out of the woods yet." "Ballpark?" The Japanese supplier, who was carefully confirming each item, goes quiet. The German buyer starts nodding at things he has only half understood. The engineer from Kochi decides not to ask what "ballpark" means, because asking might look like he is behind.

None of this is the director's intention. She is being herself, and her version of herself is fast and idiomatic, because for her English costs nothing.

This pattern has been described by people who study and teach international English. In a 2016 piece for BBC Worklife, the intercultural trainer Chia Suan Chong argued that when misunderstandings happen in international business English, it is often the native speakers who cause them, because they talk fast and lean on slang and cultural references. The same piece quoted Jennifer Jenkins, professor of global Englishes at the University of Southampton, who said that native speakers can be at a disadvantage when English is used as a lingua franca. These are the views of a trainer and a researcher reported in a magazine piece, not a measured finding, and we present them that way. But they match what our coaches hear, week after week.

The real skill is adjusting

We want to be careful here. The point is not that native speakers are bad communicators, any more than anyone else is. The point is that one particular skill matters more than accent or vocabulary in an international room: the willingness to adjust how you speak so that the person in front of you can follow.

Second-language speakers often practise this skill daily without naming it. They have to. Native speakers, especially those who have only ever worked in one language, may never have been forced to build it. That is not a flaw in their character. It is a gap in their practice, and gaps can be closed.

What native speakers could borrow

If we were coaching that project director, we would not ask her to become someone else. We would ask her to borrow five habits from the room she just joined.

• Say the number twice. And the date. And the name. Repetition is not condescending in an international call. It is a kindness to anyone on a weak line.
• Trade the idiom for the plain version. "Roughly how much?" instead of "Ballpark?" Keep the idioms for people who share them.
• Pause after each point. A second of silence gives someone time to finish processing before the next idea lands on top.
• Check, without making anyone feel tested. "Let me make sure I've been clear: we're agreeing to two of the three points today." This puts the responsibility on the speaker, which is where it belongs.
• Invite the quiet person by name. "Keiko, how does this look from the factory side?" Silence in an international room is not always agreement.

None of these require learning another language. They require noticing that your fluency is not the same thing as being understood.

What the rest of us could keep

There is a lesson the other way, too. Many of the professionals we coach in India and the Gulf feel that their English is somehow less real than a native speaker's. In the shared-second-language room, that worry turns out to be beside the point. The engineer from Kochi did not need to sound British. He needed to be clear, and he was.

So we would say this to anyone who learned English as a second, third or fourth language: the habits you use to survive in English, the slowing down, the checking, the plain words, are not a sign of weakness. In an international room, they are the skill. Keep them when you get more fluent. Keep them even when the native speaker arrives and the pace picks up. You can be the person who quietly says, "Sorry, just to confirm, 'ballpark' means an estimate, yes?" and in doing so, help everyone else on the call who was too polite to ask.

A room worth copying

The best international calls we hear about have something in common. Everyone in them treats English as a shared tool rather than somebody's property. The goal is not to impress. It is to finish the call with the same understanding in five heads.

That is a standard any room can adopt, whoever is in it.

Sources

1. Lennox Morrison, Native English speakers are the world's worst communicators, BBC Worklife, 2016 (reporting the views of Chia Suan Chong and Professor Jennifer Jenkins). www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20161028-native-english-speakers-are-the-worlds-worst-communicators

Published by The Full Stop, the journal of Brightside English, in the Thought Studies series. This is an essay: an argument and an experiment of the imagination, not research. Reviewed by a Brightside senior coach. Corrections: see our editorial standard.