Beating Speaking Anxiety: 5. I’m scared people won’t understand me

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We'll have another episode of the English we speak soon. But today we're continuing with our special series Beating Speaking Anxiety. A podcast to help you fight your fears of speaking in English. This episode is called I'm Scared People Won't Understand Me. Have you ever worried about your accent? When I speak to people, uh I'm a bit nervous that they don't understand me, what what I mean, what I would say. If you could wake up tomorrow morning with any information.

In the world, what would you like to wake up with? When I start to realize that people don't understand me, I lost my confidence after it. Instead of teaching so called correct native English uh to learners, it would be better for learners if they learnt how to adjust. Today, we're going to talk about how to make sure people understand you in English. Hello and welcome to Beating Speaking Anxiety, our special series to help you fight your fears of speaking English. I'm Georgie.

And I am Hanan. You can find a transcript of this episode to help you learn on our website bbclearningenglish dot com. One part of learning another language is learning pronunciation, and often it's one of the hardest parts of speaking. Hello, my name is Anna, I'm from Ukraine. For Anna, getting the sounds of words right in English is very difficult and frustrating.

So sometimes, even if I'm not sure about the correct pronunciation of this word, I just avoid it. And because of it, my language sounds simple. Anna says she avoids some words because she's not sure about her pronunciation. Past getting people to understand her, even when she thinks what she's saying is clear. In a pub, when I want to order. But waiters don't understand. I totally sure that I said it uh correct why people don't understand.

In Anna's story, the waiter didn't understand her order. She was asking for a neat whiskey. That's without any ice or water, but the waiter thought she was saying need. Hmm. Misunderstandings like this have made Anna more embarrassed and anxious when speaking English. When I start to realize that uh people don't understand me, I lost my confidence after it.

Anna feels like her pronunciation, her accent, stops her from having successful conversations in English, even when she knows exactly what she wants to say, and fears about accents can make lots of learners nervous to speak.

When I started the work it was taken as an assumption that every learner would be aiming to acquire a native-like English accent. This is Jennifer Jenkins from the University of Southampton. Jennifer studies accents and English as a lingua franca. This means people with lots of different first languages using English as a common language, for example, in workplaces around the world. Jennifer says that in the past the

Many learners and teachers believes they should try to make their accent sound like a native British person, an accent called received pronunciation. But there are many, many other accents of of native English accents. So It's already a query. Do you really want to sound like I think it's less than three percent of native English speakers have a received pronunciation accent, the sort of accent more or less like mine, and the rest don't. The rest have other accents.

For Jennifer, the most important thing when communicating in a learned language, particularly when they are speaking to someone else who is not a native speaker, is that everyone understands one another. Something Jennifer calls intelligibility. I started to say intelligibility was the key thing. And therefore it didn't matter for the what accent you had, I mean, if you're German your accent would sound German, if you're Japanese, your accent would sound Japanese and so on.

As long as you made sure that your accent was intelligible to the person you were speaking to. Jennifer says that it doesn't matter what your accent sounds like as long as it's intelligible. That means that people can understand it. She also thinks it's important people celebrate their accents. After all, accents are a part of who we are and where we come from. One of the questions I often asked in my research was if you could wake up tomorrow morning with any English

accent in the world, any accent, and that would be your accent. What would you like to wake up with? They all said I would love to wake up tomorrow with native English accent. Later in the same interview I always asked them about would they like To lose their accent, and once they started to think about losing, I mean, I can still remember one Italian um

She was a teacher of English. I am Italian. I am proud of being Italian. I do not want to lose my Italian identity. And therefore, when it came to it, she wanted to keep her Italian accent in her English. Of course, as we heard from Anna at the start of the programme, there are times when people don't understand a particular accent, which can be frustrating.

Jennifer says that you can avoid these misunderstandings by practicing something called accommodation. Which is basically just adjusting the way you speak. to make yourself understood by the person you're speaking to. So you work out quickly what sort of thing in your accent they don't understand and then you try not to do those things.

How you accommodate will depend on who you are speaking to and whether the first language is similar to yours. In some first languages, um there is no w sound, so the v is used north-south-east.

best um in other languages, they you have a v and uh they have a wa and they wouldn't understand if you changed that to a ver. So you have to work it out. And so I've always said that um instead of teaching So called correct native English uh to learners it would be better for learners if they learnt how to adjust.

Mae'n ymwneud â llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer o llawer Accommodating your accent for each person you speak to sounds very complicated and like a lot of hard work, but there are some things you can do to make things easier.

Try to practice with people who speak a different first language to you. That way you'll notice the parts of your accent that are difficult to understand, and you can adapt it. What's important to understand is that the vast majority of English speakers around the world are non native, all bringing their own identities and accents to the language.

And most of all, be proud of your accent. Try your best not to be flustered when you're misunderstood. Find other ways to explain what you mean and try to notice what it was about your pronunciation that caused confusion. Thanks for listening to this episode of Beating Speaking Anxiety. To learn more about speaking anxiety, head to our website where Georgie has made videos. Each of the speaking fears we talk about in this series.

You will hear more advice and see some tips in action with real learners. Use the link in the notes for this episode or visit. bbclearningenglish.com. Next time we'll be talking about humour in English and what to do when you don't get the joke. Goodbye for now. Bye bye. Hej, välj en firma bilbygd för nordisk klimat. Från fyros drift finns i alla våra modeller, även elektriska idas, kargo och ittranspor. Välkommen till folk en transportbil.