Skills in English for the non-native professional
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  • Skills in English for the non-native speaker
    • Native Proficiency: La filosofía.
    • Native Proficiency: La metodología.
    • PLANNING YOUR LEARNING: WELCOME TO COACHING FOR ENGLISH
      • TRAINING FORMATS
      • Modalidades de formación
    • THREE LAYERS: UNDERSTANDING THE NATIVEPROFICIENCY APPROACH
      • LANGUAGE SKILLS
      • COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS
      • PROFESSIONAL SKILLS
  • Contacto – Acerca de esta web / Contact – About this website

Skills in English for the non-native professional

Category

Communication Skills

Cambridge examsCoachingCommunication SkillsEn EspañolFAQFirst CertificateLearning Tips

¿Qué examen oficial me conviene? Quizá ninguno.

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

Hoy en día nos enfrentamos a una exagerada oferta de opciones y una inundación de datos – información – que encontramos difícil de procesar. De ahí el éxito de fenómenos como el “clickbait” o las “fake news”. En lo que nos interesa, hay una oferta cada vez mayor de certificaciones de idiomas, especialmente de inglés. Esto es el lógico resultado de algo que se ha convertido en un negocio multimillonario. Igual que ha pasado con el fútbol profesional, que ya es más negocio que deporte.

La principal ventaja de obtener una certificación académica es algo que no se le escapa a nadie: el reconocimiento por alguna entidad de prestigio u organismo público de los conocimientos y habilidades que tenemos. La cultura educativa en España ha llevado esto al extremo en el sentido de que en muchos casos la gente se obsesiona con “el trozo de papel” y no presta tanta atención a lo que hay detrás. Se ha convertido en algunos casos en algo tan aspiracional que la gente ni se plantea realmente lo que significan ciertas cosas.

Recuerdo una anécdota que contaba un amigo mío sobre lo que quería su madre que estudiase en la universidad. Ella estaba obsesionada con que quería que su hijo estudiase “medicina en la Universidad de Deusto”. ¡Lo que no sabía la pobre señora es que la Universidad de Deusto no tenía facultad de medicina!

Yo siempre estoy dando la paliza con que hay que tener muy claras las aspiraciones y los objetivos que se tienen en la vida, porque eso afecta a las decisiones que tomamos y a la motivación con la que nos enfrentamos a las tareas, incluido el aprendizaje de un idioma. Pero tenemos que mantener los pies en la realidad. Por ejemplo si estamos atrapados en un trabajo que no nos gusta tenemos que planear la salida adecuadamente. Si trasladamos todo esto al aprendizaje de un idioma tenemos que plantearnos dos preguntas: ¿Para qué? y ¿Cómo?

La más importante es ¿Para qué?: si nuestro aprendizaje no tiene sentido lo abandonaremos. Un objetivo grandioso y trascendente es importante, pero necesitamos pequeños objetivos parciales que nos ayuden por el camino. Una vez que tengamos esto bien planteado, podremos decidir cómo hacerlo, y una herramienta – no la única – es obtener una certificación oficial.

¿Qué nos piden?

Dependiendo de para que lo necesitemos, tenemos que fijarnos en los requerimientos del “mercado”. Por ejemplo, internacionalmente,  si necesitamos demostrar nuestros conocimientos de inglés, la certificación que nos van a pedir suelen ser el Ielts o el toefl. Por lo tanto si hemos obtenido un título de Cambridge como el First or el Advanced o tenemos la titulación de las escuelas oficiales de idiomas, no nos la van a admitir. Por lo tanto lo primero es enterarse si hay alguna estándar requerido en el entorno laboral o educativo al que queremos acceder.

El gran plan… ¿Ah, no tienes uno?

Hace unos años una alumna quería obtener el First Certificate de Cambridge. Era parte de su plan. Tenerlo era útil laboralmente – es un título ampliamente reconocido en España. Pero ese no era su objetivo final. Lo que quería era poner a punto su inglés para un objetivo profesional: una serie de certificaciones internacionales que se obtienen mediante exámenes que solamente se pueden hacer en inglés. Preparó el first certificate, obtuvo un nivel C1 y ahora tiene la certificación que realmente necesitaba, porque al obtener el “First” lo que hizo fue refrescar y poner a punto sus habilidades comunicativas en inglés.

El significado del “trozo de papel”: las competencias.

No todos los exámenes son iguales ( si no a estas alturas muchos habrían desaparecido) sino que certifican cosas diferentes. Por mi experiencia profesional, los que mejor conozco son los de Cambridge. La frase más frecuente entre mis alumnos siempre ha sido “es que esto es muy difícil”. Y tienen razón. La dificultad de los exámenes de Cambridge no viene del nivel lingüístico. Si esto fuese así podrías tener ese nivel, presentarte el día del examen y aprobar. Pero es necesario prepararse para el examen porque no se trata de quien sabe más, sino de quien sabe hacer esto o lo otro con lo que sabe.

El examen obviamente requiere destrezas lingüísticas, es decir, manejar correctamente gramática, vocabulario y pronunciación. Pero lo importante es que dando eso por sentado eso, lo que te piden es que demuestres destrezas comunicativas. Por eso el examen está dividido de acuerdo con las destrezas: writing, speaking, listening y reading. Lo que el examen pretende es asegurarse de que te puedes comunicar en inglés. En otras palabras, que eres competente en el idioma. Cada uno de los “ejercicios” de cada una de las partes del examen está diseñado para saber si tienes una destreza comunicativa concreta. Destrezas que tienes – o deberías tener – en tu lengua materna.

Y ser hablante nativo no es garantía de pasar el examen automáticamente. Muchos hablantes nativos lo suspenderían.

Infórmate

En resumen: necesitas informarte. En primer lugar de lo que quieres conseguir, o irás como pollo sin cabeza. En segundo lugar de los requisitos que pueda haber marcados por las reglas de juego de los objetivos que te hayas marcado. Finalmente, tendrás que enterarte – o buscar quien te asesore – sobre qué exámen te puede convenir.

Quizá… ninguno. Quizá la “necesidad” venía de una presión social, del “todos mis amigos lo tienen”. Quizá la “necesidad” venía de dejarse asesorar por gente equivocada. Modas absurdas, grupos de WhatsApp de padres del colegio… sacúdete todos esos condicionantes y quédate con el propósito que importa que es el tuyo. No vivimos aislados, pero tenemos que re-evaluar el peso que damos en nuestras decisiones a cosas como el prestigio (que como viene se va), las modas (lo mismo) o la presión del entorno personal o laboral. En el fondo, lo que importa es adquirir esas destrezas de las que hablaba más arriba. Poder hacer cosas en inglés – o el idioma que quieras. Ese es el superpoder que puedes adquirir. Y eso es lo importante de una certificación, lo que la hace interesante y relevante. Y no al revés.

 

¿Qué examen oficial me conviene? Quizá ninguno. was last modified: May 20th, 2019 by Francisco Sanjurjo
20th May 2019 1 comment
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Communication Across CulturesCommunication SkillsPronunciationSpeaking Skills

Would you like to be taken seriously?

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

Being taken seriously is a serious issue. It is mostly about respect and treating people equally. But sometimes we don’t treat people seriously for a number of reasons, objective and subjective. Maybe we do not want to be taken seriously. But what if we do and we fail? Seriousness is in the eye of the beholder. The way you look, the clothes you wear, your haircut.

How you sound? Yes, being taken seriously is also a matter of how you sound. More so in English than let’s say in Spanish. How you sound is a very wide concept, so let’s have a look (I will try and make it quick) at the factors that make you sound serious.

If you mean business, act the part. Sound the part.

It goes without saying that what you say is important. But the way you sound is part of your sales pitch.

First of all: the individual sounds.  Pronouncing clearly and correctly the individual sounds is important to a great extent, because it is the base of what makes us understandable.

Let’s say you arrived to your hotel room and found the bed sheets have not been changed since the last guest’s departure. You call reception and you politely ask “could you please change the bed shits?” Chances are you will hear a stiffled chuckle and sooner or later someone will come to your room and change your sheets. However you may become “the guest who asked to have the shits changed”. Quite likely they understood you perfectly because of the context, but still, what they heard was shit, and not sheet.

Lesson #1: individual sounds can be the difference between two words. If you make mistakes with that in a professional context you may give off an aura of amateurship. This happens to native speakers too, because being a native speaker is no guarantee either.

Let’s continue: We do not spell words sound by sound, and we don’t say words in total isolation. Our brains do the work of cutting up the pieces when we hear them, because we recognize when and where to cut. However you need to train your brain – not your ear as people would expect – to make these fine distinctions. This is called “connected speech“. Chopping everything in discrete pieces as you speak is tiring and confusing on the listener, specially if they are native speakers and they are expecting you to connect the sounds and the words.

Lesson#2: sounds and words do not happen in isolation and when we speak we connect them constantly rather than finish one and start the next. It is important to learn to do this confidently because your listeners’ brains are expecting you to do it. Otherwise you are puzzling and annoying them one word at a time.

Finally (for now), we need to discuss intonation. Intonation patterns, the “ups” and “downs” in every sentence are not a whim or a choice for the speaker. They have meanings like the difference between questions and statements, or the difference between being “neutral” or expressing sarcasm. Your audience will probably be more understanding of mistakes with this if they know you are a non-native speaker. Or they may be thinking “he’s been here for five years and still speaks like this?”. Or you might be sounding offensive without noticing.

Lesson #3: intonation is like the icing on the cake. But a rather important icing. There may be more pressing matters, such as the two above. However, mastering it will still make a huge difference in how effective or confusing your communication efforts are. In reverse, pay attention to people’s intonation when they speak to you: they might be saying more than words alone can express.

Did you find it interesting? Do yo think you could use some help with any of this stuff?

Info.nativeprofiency@gmail.com

Would you like to be taken seriously? was last modified: November 6th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
2nd October 2018 0 comment
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Communication SkillsProfessional SkillsSoft SkillsWriting Skills

A better life through better e-mails

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

I hope you have read my post about how to write better reports and as a result, how to make your life and your readers’ lives better. This time I am going to tackle e-mail writing. Not everybody writes reports. However, people  who are not flooded by emails are hard to find in any workplace.  So improving your e-mail writing skills might give you faster returns, since you are going to use it from day one.

So what makes great e-mails? In a professional, corporate environment, e-mails perform several functions:

  1. They transport information.  I mean, that is why we send e-mails right? To tell each other things.
  2. The advantage of this over speaking is that unless you are recording the conversation or there are witnesses to it, it is gone with the wind.
  3. Therefore an e-mail can be used as a reminder, as storage for information that has been received – or sent! (Did I send you that… let me check my sent-messages folder… oh crap it is in the out-box.)
  4. You do business through them: you buy from your suppliers, you sell to your clients, you send and receive bills… you make money! And if your emails are not up to the task, sometimes, you lose money.

So how can I write better e-mails?

Establish routines, for your e-mails to be more efficient (and manageable!) find a system, a protocol that works for you. Priorities first. My suggestion is to go with the WH- words, quickly brainstorming for potentially risky aspects.

Who wrote it (or who is writing it!)

If you have received an e-mail and plan to write back, you have to consider who is it that is writing: is it a client or a supplier, is it a routine marketing promotional message or is it a message from the CEO of a big multinational? If you are writing it, you must not forget who you represent and what you stand for. Specially if you are the CEO!

Who will receive it.

Anything said  about writing it applies to the receiving end. You must apply whatever you know about the receiver and if you do not know much – or anything – about them, you must be businesslike and respectful. There is always time to relax your manners, but not until you see the other part gives you signals that you can do it.

What the e-mail is about.

This is different from the reason you are writing: if you are writing concerning a shipment it could be for many different reasons, but if it is a shipment, you should not forget the reference of the shipment! So it is not the same discussing things with a prospective client than with a client you have been dealing with and with whom you see eye to eye.

The reason for writing.

Is it business as usual, a reasonable request or an urgent demand that debt be paid? So the tone of the message changes.

When has it been written.

Is it urgent, or am I writing ahead of time? is a deadline about to be met or are you past the deadline?

Where is it being written (to and from).

This above all is a matter of cultural issues when there is a potential for misunderstanding because you and your correspondent have different cultural backgrounds.

What expectations do either side have?

Are you hoping to make this person or company a new client? Are you trying to put out a fire and solve a conflict? or is it the confirmation of something being received?

What about the structure of e-mails? A common pitfall, specially if many e-mails are written internally to colleagues within the company is to drop the protocol.  However that kind of problem pales in comparison with the faces people can pull when they receive an email whose body simply does not make sense. People want to read an e-mail. If they have to make an effort to decipher what you are saying, that is bad for your business.

How can I make sure my message gets clearly across? Once more, if you have read my post about reports, you can guess much of the advice suggested for reports can be scaled down to e-mail writing: planning, organization, keeping a cool head and not jumping directly to writing whatever crosses our mind.

In a way it is easier to reply to an email, because it is just a matter of reacting: answering questions, requests. They ask, we answer. However real life is messy and a request for information about a specific product could be the perfect chance to point out another in passing.

Whatever you have in mind, paragraphs are your best friends: if the email covers more than one topic or that topic is complex, break it down in paragraphs. Each paragraph should be internally coherent around a main concept. This makes for easier reference if anybody needs to go back to it and look for something specific. Nobody likes to look for a needle in a haystack. Therefore if paragraphs follow a logical sequence, if their content is internally coherent and if sentences are well structured and connected with each other, your emails will be received with pleasure, even if they are bad news.

Questions, doubts? Feel free to leave your comments below or contact here.

A better life through better e-mails was last modified: September 15th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
15th September 2018 0 comment
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Communication SkillsProfessional SkillsWriting Skills

ARE YOUR REPORTS GOOD ENOUGH?

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

Think of the things that take you most time at work, and which you feel should not take such a long time.

Unnecesary, badly planned meetings come to mind, going through your e-mail inbox every morning – specially after you have been on holiday. Presentations bring out your perfectionist panicky self because you need to defend them in front of an audience.

Reports anyone? Reports can be tiring in two ways: writing them and reading them. You probably have no control over how people write the reports you have to read, but maybe your reports are driving people nuts or putting them to sleep.

Let’s make a checklist of areas for improvement – which does not mean you need to tick all the boxes:

  1. Grammar and spelling mistakes. Yes, that gets in the way. You probably know it and now you wish your teachers, your parents and yourself had pushed you harder that way.
  2. General writing skills. starting from the basic “plan, think, write”. Unless it is a highly mechanical task or you have a template to follow in which you hardly change anything but numbers. In that case, it is not a report, it is a form! (And reading forms disguised as reports is really boring.
  3. Connected with the previous point, organization skills are fundamental.

Goals you should set yourself:

  1. People should be able to find specific information easily. Maybe they are looking at your report only to find a specific piece of data, and making them read the whole thing to find just a piece of data is cruelty. Creating an index with internal links is a great idea. There should be an index for the reports sections and also an index for graphs, charts etc. Or pile them up at the end of your writing. In any case, when looking at them becomes necessary to understand what you are talking about, always give a page reference.
  2. Unless you have done this thing a million times – in which case maybe you don’t need me! – go from rough to polished. What does this mean? Start by making an informal list of things you want to include in the report. One big mistake people make when writing a report is start writing directly. In contrast, if you have a clear plan, with clear goals, writing will be more smooth. Do not trust your mind to remember everything. Write. It. Down. That will help your mind focus and it will impact on the quality of your writing.
  3. Create a solid structure: down to paragraph level. If a paragraph is not in your planned structure it should not be in your report. Everything should have a function. Result: people will read only what is strictly necessary.
  4. Follow a logical sequence and don’t create loops. This is why it is so important to plan down to paragraph level: you start something, you finish something and everything about that specific point is together in that neat paragraph you just wrote. Also, if you need to add some information later, for example updating a report to include new developments, you will know where to put it and people who read the previous version will know here to find it. It will save you time and effort when writing and it will do the same for your readers.
  5. Remind yourself not to write sentences which are too long. It is better from all points of view to write sentences which are no longer than two full lines. Instead, force yourself to use connectors such as however, nevertheless, although… in order to connect sentences and not so much within sentences.
  6. Inspire yourself: if you find a report – or other documents such as a technical manual – that you found easy, pleasant to read – go back to it and pay attention to how it is written.

Feel free to make your comments about this post, and if you feel you might need professional help to take your report writing skills to the next level, contact me here.

 

ARE YOUR REPORTS GOOD ENOUGH? was last modified: September 15th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
15th September 2018 0 comment
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Communication SkillsCourses and SeminarsLanguage SkillsProfessional Skills

Face-to-face or Online?

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

You have a busy life. You have shifting timetables, unscheduled, last-minute meetings. Maybe you still prefer the warmth of face-to-face classes. Maybe you travel around the world across multiple time-zones. Or maybe you just have time at the weekends when you are in your house in a village (but you have WIFI!)

Looking for options that fit your unpredictable life? Get in touch here.

Face-to-face or Online? was last modified: September 13th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
12th September 2018 0 comment
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Communication SkillsLanguage SkillsLearning TipsListening Skills

Troubleshooting listening.

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

I have seen many learners of English panicking in class and in exams when the time came to do a listening activity or a listening test. people feeling sick and me feeling sick mfor them, because many of them were suffering for the wrong reasons: not knowing what to do about it, having spent endless hours frustrated, not understanding why they weren’t making as much progress as they wanted, as they needed. And in some cases, no progress at all.

Obviously I have spent a lot of time thinking about ways to help people. I looked in many places: I looked in books, I looked for answers asking colleagues over the years. And I looked into my own experience, reflecting in how I came to the listening skills I have now.

I am going to state the obvious now: if you are learning English, it is a foreign language for you. It is a language you are not familiar with. In teaching and learning it (I will speak about practising it which is a whole different matter), emphasis has been made on grammar (good!) and vocabulary (good!). However  something has been traditionally neglected is learning something that belongs alongside grammar structures and vocabulary items: the sounds of English and the rules to combine them.

Building blocks: not only words, but sounds too.

It is funny: I like to think of grammar and vocabulary as the building blocks you need to start combining to produce linguistic messages, to communicate in any language. Grammar structures and vocabulary items, abstractly considered, are what you need for the four traditional skills: speaking, listening, writing and reading. However, if you do not know how they are pronounced you will not be able to understand spoken messages and if you are not able to pronounce things correctly, your spoken messages will be problematic.

Therefore, establishing a comparison, the individual sounds of the English language are the building blocks, like vocabulary items. And the rules for combining them would be a kind of grammar. I would say we were missing a whole area that was very important.

A quick historical aside.

The reasons this has been neglected in the traditional language classroom  in Spain are predictable. The languages that were taught in Spain for many years were mostly dead languages – Latin and Greek. Until schooling became widespread, the only people who were likely to be bilingual were those in regions where there was a local language, like Gallego and Catalan.  French was for the elites and it was a symbol of status that very few people used outside the classroom.

To cut the story short, hardly anybody was learning to speak any other languages than their own. Therefore, why bother with pronunciation, if speaking and listening hardly ever happened. And if they happened “We can manage”.

So what’s wrong with me doctor?

The attitude to learning, as with any other task in life, is always important: if you see something as a problem – it becomes a problem for you. If you do not understand what your problem is, the solution with elude you. Unless you have some congenital or acquired medical condition, you are perfectly able to acquire a language, including speaking and listening skills. Here is a list, however, of the things you might need to pay attention to. They are not your fault… until you don’t do anything to solve them!

You are not tuned.

What do I mean by this? Imagine you are listening to the radio. if you do not tune to the exact frequency, you will have background noise or the signal will come and go. When we listen to people we are in the right frequency too. Sometimes it happens with people in your own language: you do not understand them. That is because you do not know their “frequency”: they speak differently enough so you have trouble understanding them:

 

 

This is a trailer for the Wreck it Ralph! sequel. Here, the other princesses who all speak standard English (Including Pocahontas!) complain that they cannot understand Merida, who speaks in Scottish English (I don’t think that’s gaelic, you would understand even far less). This is a joke among native speakers. So it could happen to you. If you happen to find yourself in such an extreme situation, do not blame yourself, ask for help!

But my point here obviously is that if you are not familiar with the way that native speakers – at least speakers of standard varieties – pronounce things, then you will be expecting whatever your brain makes up.

Solution (for this and other problems about your listening): Listen to video with subtitles in English or books with audio version. reading and listening to what you are reading. Look for lyric videos of popular songs on youtube (you can look at my posts on Katy Perry or Nicky Minaj) or use apps like “Learn English Podcasts” from the British council.

Obviously, no matter how much you have listened to native speakers, you could come across new vocabulary. That is not a listening problem, that is in the first place a vocabulary problem: you need to know the word, know its meaning and then hear it being pronounced. Even if you are a native speaker, if the word or the meaning with which it is used is new to you, that will create interference. But your listening skills are not to blame. The same applies to unfamiliar or new grammar structures, or simply new accents like Merida’s.

Therefore, be careful not to blame your listening skills when the reason may well be other deficits.  Even someone saying something completely unexpected: there is this line from the film “As good as it gets” where Carol (Helen Hunt) is packing for her first holiday in years and says “here is a suitcase, surprised to be used”. If you think about it all the words she uses are rather basic, it is the way she has created the sentence that is totally unexpected and anybody could reasonably ask her “Sorry, what did you say?”.

Expectations about what is coming next are a fundamental pillar of listening, it is actually our radio frequency tuner. The more we listen, the more samples we gather, the more precise our listening machine becomes. The good news is that our brain is very capable of extrapolating efficiently, so once you cross a certain threshold, your listening skills improve dramatically. But you need to give it food! The first day you work with a colleague from Australia you will probably feel lost, after a week, you may even speak a little like them!

Another factor that helps a lot, specially with the foundations of your english listening skills is repetition. I mean, listening to the same things over an over. I cannot thank enough those music casettes and CDs with the lyrics printed on when I was a teenager. I would listen to the music over and over and eventually, what they were saying became absolutely familiar. And then I thought, OK, let’s expand on this.

I could ramble on about this and other anecdotes… but this is getting long, right? So one final sentence: be objective and do not blame your listening skills when you might have other problems working against you.

And if you feel you need help and guidance, you can contact me here!

Troubleshooting listening. was last modified: September 17th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
15th May 2014 0 comment
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Communication Across CulturesCommunication SkillsLearning TipsProfessional Skills

Skills in English: the cultural shock.

written by Francisco Sanjurjo

When we acquire a skill in a new language it is more than just putting words together. When you come in contact with new people, even in your own culture, you store information in your brain about how to deal with them: how they need to be greeted, how they like to go about doing things or what sets them on edge.

When we approach a different culture, a different language, a different country, we need to acquire the “ways of the land”. That is the way things are done in the particular place where the skill is going to be used. This is particularly important when learning to do things in English. It is truly a global language and that means that people will use English in environments where nobody is a native speaker. English and “how things are done” do not go automatically hand in hand.

One factor in this is  the huge number of varieties of English: English has been nativized in many countries, like The Philipines, or Singapore. In other countries people do not use “English” strictly speaking, but creoles, local languages that have formed using English as their foundations – often because it was the language of the colonists –  but including many local vocabulary and grammar items.

Try this easy experiment: if you live in a medium-sized or big city and use public transport – or even walking down the street – eavesdrop subsaharan immigrants when they are talking among themselves. Often they come from countries that used to be british colonies and they speak english-based creoles. (Or French-based creoles in some cases.

A second factor is what happens in countries like Spain where English is not a language people use in everyday life. The influence on English when it is spoken as a foreign language or a second language depends on the contact the speaker has had with an English speaking culture and also with whether the person or people spoken to are native speakers or second language speakers as well.

People who come from monolingual contexts – quite common in Spain – will feel their heads spinning by now. What is the protocol if nobody is a native speaker? It is not an easy issue. Even if there are native speakers, they could be in the minority.  Usually native speakers are the most problematic in international environments, where they are just one more player in the game. In any case, common sense and politeness dictate that one should stick to the rules and customs of the host country. And of course, observe and adjust as you go. Again, common sense.

In conclusion, using English as a language for international communication is a matter of juggling with the different cultures, the origins of people and the location and situation where communication takes place. It requires an open mind, ready to not be shocked at anything – which doesn’t mean everything goes – and also ready to learn.

Skills in English: the cultural shock. was last modified: September 13th, 2018 by Francisco Sanjurjo
18th September 2015 0 comment
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