Is language ability limiting your career?
You have missed another opportunity for promotion because of your lower English level. You have tried, but nothing has worked. Don’t give up yet. First, understand your problem. To improve your professional English, you need to understand what language, communication, and training are and what they are not.
Only then can you find the right training to help you efficiently and effectively use your time to solve the problem and develop your professional English communication skills.
You are 10 or more years into your professional career at a multinational institution. You have worked hard to gain experience and develop your hard skills. You want a successful future in your international organization, but that depends on a high English proficiency to communicate with colleagues or cross-functional teams in other countries. Perhaps you are a professional in accounting, product management, marketing, sales or research, but your English is your weakness. Even though you have tried to improve your English, your TOEIC score is still between 600 and 700. You need better English or a TOEIC score of at least 850 to become promoted to international buyer, regional supervisor, or international program developer.
Why can’t I improve my English
You have tried many ways to improve your English communications skills, like
- Practical conversation courses. You now feel a bit more comfortable chatting, but still struggle with professional communication.
- Writing or grammar courses. Your knowledge of grammar improved, but was soon forgotten.
- Self-study for TOEIC and took 2 or 3 exams. Your scores improved a bit and you learned more business vocabulary but your communication ability did not actually improve.
- Several LinkedIn or online communication skills courses. You appreciated their insights but without language practice, these ideas just remain ideas.
- 1- or 2-day workshops. They inspired you to use some communication tricks, but you soon forgot about them and nothing changed.
Should you give up?
Well, you can spend hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours studying vocabulary, grammar, reading TOEIC test prep books, and spending a lot of money on taking more TOEIC courses and TOEIC tests for a broad knowledge of business English, which you may not even need for your job.
Or, you can be more targeted with your Language and Communication Training and develop the key competences for your role.
What is Language Communication Training (LCT)?
Once you can demonstrate professional language and communication skills in your job, your superiors will know this and will promote you even without a high TOEIC score. After all, it is your ability to do your job well and communicate well in your job that is the most important consideration for getting a promotion.
Nonetheless, Language Communication Training (LCT) is still difficult. Even smart, efficient, and targeted training to achieve the key language and communication skills for your job takes time and effort. But it will be more effective than simply getting a higher TOEIC score.
Let’s first look at why your attempts to improve your English communication skills have not reached your expectations. For this, we need to look at professional English development by knowing the answers to 3 questions:
- What is language?
- What is communication?
- What is training?
1. What is Language? – More than words and grammar!
When you say you want to improve your English, you might only be thinking only of language–words and grammar.
It seems easy, right? You need to know more Words and you need to know the Grammar rule system to put the words together in the correct ways. However, it is not that simple. Language use is not just about correct use–it is also appropriate use.
But let me tell you a secret: acceptable and professional language use often does not need to be grammatically correct or even appropriate in some contexts. But now we are moving away from the idea of language and moving toward the much bigger idea of communication.
If you really want to improve your professional English, what you really want is to improve your communication skills. Let’s call this communicative competence. Words and grammar (let’s call this linguistic competence) is only a part of communicative competence.
2. What is Communication? – More than just language!
Communication is more than just having an idea, putting it into words (encoding), and then speaking or writing these words (sending) to somebody who then receives the words and tries to understand them (decoding). This is the traditional view of communication as transmission: encoding, sending, and decoding language signals.
However this view of communication is too simplistic. A 10-year old already has a basic mastery of her first language–but she will be clueless about how to communicate in a professional context. So, communication involves understanding context and how things and people relate to each other in that context.
In professional contexts, you are often actively involved in communication events like report writing, staff meetings, and sales negotiations. The events all have a goal that can either be successfully or unsuccessfully achieved. But the visible language encoding-decoding of words and grammar (linguistic competence) is, quite literally, just the tip of the iceberg that is visible in the communication event. This visible language emerges from 4 layers of communication competences that decide what to say and how to say it appropriately, which in turn depends on understanding what the context is, who you are talking to, and what they expect to hear.
So, what are the 4 competences that make up communicative competence?
4 Communicative Competences = linguistic + strategic + interactive + influence
So, communicative competence is actually an umbrella term that actually consists of 4 overlapping and interrelated competences. In addition to linguistic competence, professional communicators must also use strategic, interactive and influence competences. Let’s go through each one in more detail.
- Strategic competence refers to accommodation strategies that are used to prevent communication breakdown, like repeating yourself, finding other words and ways of expressing something if you can’t think of the right word or your listener does not understand what you mean.
- Interactive competence is appropriate communication and means knowing the context and audience expectation, like what information should be contained in the introduction of a research or financial report or how you greet someone at a conference or ask a favor. Here, appropriate communication has the goal of communicating intelligibly and appropriately for others to understand you. In Applied Linguistics, these are called discourse, sociolinguistic, and pragmatic competences. I combined them under the term “interactive competence” to keep it simple because they deal with understanding what language and communication others need to receive in order to be able to communicate appropriately and efficiently with them.
- Influence competence is important because clear, intelligible, and appropriate communication is often not enough in professional contexts where the achieving of communication goals has to do with influencing others to make a decision. Influence competence has more to do with how our brains receive information and understanding how information is processed not just for understanding, but also for impact and persuasion. This competence is less about what the other person needs to understand, but more about how you want the other person to understand you. This is why it is discussed a lot in training for professionals in fields like management, sales, and marketing (Ash, 2021; Asher, 2019; Bloomfield, 2020; Morin and Renvoise, 2018; Renvoise and Morin, 2007). However, influence as a skill is generally overlooked in Applied Linguistics. Perhaps this is because it is hard to associate with language, or it is assumed to be implicit within interactive competences, or perhaps such practical applications within fields like sales and marketing are seen as too salesy and unrespectable as linguistic research topics. Nonetheless, there has been a lot of neuroscience research into the cognitive biases that influence our decision-making, which often has less to do rules of logic or cost-benefit calculations and more to do with intuition and emotion (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974; Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier, 2011; Kahneman, 2011).
While this influence-type of interactive competence tends to be lacking (or only implied) in linguistic research, it is also lacking in many professional language-based training. (Or, if it is a focus of professional communication training, the linguistic part of communication is ignored, like in training for native-speakers who are assumed to be able to put the principles of influence into specific words and sentences.) This is unfortunate. After all, the point of professional communication is not just intelligible and appropriate language use. You always have an aim to achieve some goal, like relationship building, getting information or asking someone to make a decision.
Correct or native-speaker English is usually not most important
This communication competence, interestingly enough, depends a lot less on language proficiency than you might think. And usually it does not mean you have to speak like a native speaker; in fact, using native speaker types of language and communication styles may actually hinder communication.
It is not uncommon to hear writing teachers tell their students this: “Don’t say ‘she walked into the bar;’ instead say, ‘she sauntered into the bar’”. But contrary to what many native English speaking writing coaches suggest (even those who claim to coach non-native English learners), you don’t need uncommon and vivid verbs or words to influence your readers.
This advice might be good for professional writers and copywriters whose target readers are native speakers or residents of English speaking countries. But if you are struggling to improve your English and communication skills, this is actually bad advice: you will not only waste time learning unnecessary words, but also probably misuse them because uncommon words are uncommon because they are only used in a few (uncommon) situations that are not obvious. In fact, using specific and precise verbs is especially bad advice if your audience lives outside of English-speaking countries–they will misunderstand them and tune out.
This is a communication breakdown.
The role of context and influence in communication and relationship building
The opposite of communication breakdown is communication connection, which happens when your communication is appropriate to the situation and expected by the people you communicate with. This means that you understand contexts and skillfully build relationships and interactions with both people (like colleagues and clients) and things (like smart phones, apps, words, and images) in these contexts to influence others. Within these context ensembles or assemblages [裝配? assemblage theory=集合论], you use different resources and tools to convey senses, meanings, and information to have an affect on others, like to get them to make a business decision, answer a question, or make an appointment to meet with you.
Communicative competence therefore covers not only intelligible and appropriate language and expression, but also influence strategies used to convey ideas with relevance and persuasion. These strategies can be loosely divided into influence for communication and influence for building relationships. For communication, there has been a lot of neuroscience research on how to help brains better understand information by organizing the content and structure of your message, like by personalizing messages to the other person, keeping the information limited and easy to understand, using images, vivid contrasts, and stories for emotional impact and understanding (e.g., Harhut, 2022; Ash 2021). For building relationships, there has also been a growing literature on principles of influence (Cialdini, 1987), like establishing authority, social proof, or reciprocity to build relationships.
Key principles of influence
| Influence in communication message (Ash, 2021) | Influence in building relationships (Cialdini, 1987; the 7th principle, he only recently added) |
| Personal: Focus on the people you communicate with and what they need or want. | Principle 1. Reciprocity: This happens when you want to return a favor or a good deed or respond to a positive action with another positive action. |
| Contrastable: People understand something more easily if it is compared to something else. | Principle 2. Consistency (commitment): This is really about integrity and character. Once you say you will do something, you have a strong desire to do what you said you are going to do. |
| Tangible: People cannot process a lot of information, so keep your message simple with easy to understand ideas | Principle 3. Social proof (consensus): This is when you follow what others are doing. |
| Memorable: You can arouse people’s interest with strong beginnings and help them remember with strong endings. | Principle 4. Likability: You tend to like others who are similar to you and you will tend be more influenced by them. |
| Visual: Use vivid images to help people understand images much faster and more easily than words and numbers. | Principle 5. Authority: People will often obey you if they think you are an authority or have a position of power like a manager or teacher. |
| Emotional: Appeal to people’s emotions because people make most decisions based on feelings, and then later rationally justify the decision. | Principle 6. Scarcity: If you want something in limited supply, you tend to want it even more. |
| Principle 7. Unity: This is when the more you feel as part of a group, the more you allow yourself to be influenced by that group. |
So, improving your professional English means improving your communicative competence. This is a complicated concept that covers linguistic, interactive, strategic, and influence competences. But how you improve your communicative competence is even more complicated. To help you understand communicative competence training, we can compare it to athletic training.
3. What is Training? – more than just practice
Now you understand that language ability is only one piece of the communication puzzle, you need to understand how to train for communication competence. Communication is a skill that can be trained like other skills, as long as you know the components.
ATST model: athletic training example
Let’s compare it with athletic training. It is useful here to use, and slightly modify, Sinicki’s (2022) Attribute-Trait-Skill-Proficiency (ATSP) model. From his perspective, a proficiency can be seen as the result of a sequence or chain of components that starts with “knowledge about” (declarative knowledge) basic attributes and traits of physiology and kinesiology, which then becomes “know how” (procedural knowledge) as skills or movements are practiced. I have added the extra layer of tactics, which is more like a planning strategy of how to use discrete skills in a real situation. The learning and practice of these ATS+T levels leads to proficiency.
Continuing with the athletic skills analogy, let’s take boxing as an example. On the learning journey to boxing proficiency, the boxer needs certain attributes, traits, skills, and tactics to box.
Attributes
- As a boxer, you need two arms and two legs but also knowledge of how their muscles, joints and bones work and can be trained. This can also include knowledge of diet and rest.
Traits
- You need traits for boxing, like fast foot coordination, hand-eye coordination, and explosive torso rotation for fast and powerful punches.
Skills
- In this level, you focus on skills development to develop traits, such as skipping to develop foot coordination, speed bag practice to enhance hand-eye coordination, and ab twisting exercises to develop explosive torso rotation.
Tactics
- When you achieve competence in the core skills, you can work on tactics to plan how to best use these skills in a boxing match. Tactics are interactional since boxing, like communicating, happens between people and in a specific context and therefore require simulated practice and interaction with a sparring partner or opponent. You can’t learn how to box by working out by yourself, listening to someone tell you about it, or watching others box. There is no shortcut–you have to practice real boxing with another boxer. Tactics can be short-term, like a punching combination (e.g., jab jab jab and then a surprise hook), or longer-term, like being defensive for the first few rounds to tire your opponent and save your energy for later rounds when you attack your tired opponent.
Finally, as the skills and traits develop through role playing (sparring) and real practice (boxing matches), the boxer’s pro-ficiency and pro-fessionalism improves.
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ATS+T model for effective language and communication training
Effective Language Communication Training (LCT) is not so different.
Let’s use training for a sales meeting with a potential customer, also called prospecting, as an example. First, you need to know what attributes (kind of language and language functions, like asking questions and the grammar making questions, especially tag questions) and traits (small talk first; learning about the prospect’s needs) will emerge in these situations. Skills practice will involve active listening and asking questions and encouraging the prospect to continue talking about their needs. Tactics may involve using mirroring techniques to build rapport and brief summarizing or labeling techniques to encourage the client to further elaborate on their needs. Context is important here, because the required attributes, traits, skills and tactics may differ depending on the different people and objects you interact with in the context, such as if your sales meeting is held at a trade show, or client’s office, or Starbuck’s, or Zoom meeting.
In the end, just as with boxing training, effective practice (real and/or role played) of the relevant skills and tactics will determine your pro-ficiency and real-world interaction success.
However, conducting a sales meeting with a prospect is only one of the skills that a professional sales rep needs. It is like the footwork skills of a boxer, which require specific training like skipping for coordination and running for endurance and also tactics from one round to the next. Sales presentations are another skill set, like punching combinations, and negotiation is like clinching and keeping a distance from a boxer’s opponent. To become a skilled sales rep, you need several proficiencies.
Now you know what communication competence and proficiency means, you can already guess at why your second language communication ability has been so difficult to improve. In the next article, you will learn why most LCT programs and courses fail to improve your communication skills.
References
Ash, T. (2021). Unleash Your Primal Brain: Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act. Morgan James Publishing.
Asher, J. (2019). The Neuroscience of Selling: Proven Sales Secrets to Win Over the Buyer’s Heart and Mind. Sourcebooks, Inc..
Bloomfield, J. (2020). Neuro Selling. Axon Publishing, LLC.
Cialdini, R. B. (1987). Influence. Port Harcourt: A. Michel.
Gigerenzer, G., & Gaissmaier, W. (2011). Heuristic decision making. Annual review of psychology, 62(1), 451-482.
Harhut, N. (2022). Using Behavioral Science in Marketing: Drive Customer Action and Loyalty by Prompting Instinctive Responses. Kogan Page Publishers.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Macmillan.
Kahneman, D., Sibony, O., & Sunstein, C. R. (2022). Noise. Harper Collins UK.
Morin, C. & Renvoise, P. (2018). The Persuasion Code. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Renvoise, P., & Morin, C. (2007). Neuromarketing. Harper Collins Leadership.
Sinicki, A. (2022). The Protean Performance System. NQR Productions. https://www.thebioneer.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/SF-2-The-Protean-Performance-System-Printable-Version.pdf
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases: Biases in judgments reveal some heuristics of thinking under uncertainty. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.
