The fear of not being understood
It’s easy to lose speaking confidence after having experiences where people don’t understand you. People sometimes think the solution is to lose their accent or to aim for a ‘native’ accent, but there are hundreds of native English accents and only around 25% of English speakers worldwide are native speakers. Perhaps a more helpful goal would be to aim for intelligibility. Intelligibility is how well you can be understood by different speakers of English.
Try these tips
- Try to practise speaking to people with a variety of first languages, different to your own, to notice which parts of your pronunciation cause confusion.
- If you do have a situation where someone doesn’t understand you, ask them what it was that they didn’t understand.
- Learn about different pronunciation features. Try The Pronunciation Lounge and Tim’s Pronunciation Workshop.
- Try not to take it personally when someone doesn’t understand you – maybe they just didn’t hear you!