Presenting with a Foreign Accent
The challenges of speaking in front of a few people or a larger group of people can be overwhelming, especially, if you are a nonnative English speaker. You may struggle with making your topic easy to understand both from the perspectives of conveying a message clearly (the content) and using speech that is understandable. What do you focus on to make sure that your speech is understandable and that your accent doesn’t interfere?
Use these strategy to feel more confident that you are easy to understand:
Keep your rate of speech slow. If your audience isn’t familiar with your accent, speaking too quickly (along with the accent) will contribute negatively to your overall intelligibility. Your audience will likely become distracted with the accent. Even if you have a fantastic grasp of the English language, a slow rate of speech will only enhance your audience’s understanding. This one strategy alone is the most important way to be understandable. Here’s how:
- Exaggerate your mouth movements when you speak. It’s pretty difficult to speak quickly if you over exaggerate your mouth movements. Your mouth should be moving up and down and side-to-side with ease. If you watch yourself in the mirror, you should be able to see your teeth when you speak.
- Pause to give your audience and yourself a break. Using pauses in your presentation gives the listener a chance to comprehend your message and react to what you just said. The audience needs time to absorb one idea before rushing on to the next. During a pause you can take a sip of water, check your notes, consider what to say next, take a breath and/or read cues from the audience. Use your pause time to your advantage.
- Elongate the vowels in syllables that are stressed. American English is full of syllable stress in words and words in sentences. It provides a way to sound interesting. To stress means that the stressed syllables and words are louder, higher in pitch and held onto for a longer period of time.
Practicing your speech repeatedly and learning difficult-to-pronounce words will become embedded into your long-term memory the more that you practice. Start by making sure you are pronouncing words in your area of expertise correctly.
Obstacles like these can adversely impact your confidence, your job performance, opportunities for career advancement and everyday life interactions. We understand the difficult this is causing you and we invite you to check out our free video course, The Three Best Skills to Master to Be Understood.
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