Communicative Competence

Gaining in necessity - with good reason - is the need for Communicative Competence in the Workplace. I'll skip the definition since it's included in my earlier blog ( see "Far Beyond Pronunciation from a couple of days ago) . More and more organizations aren't concerned with accent( or aren't comfortable talking about it if they are), and instead of focusing, perhaps rightly so, on the ability to communicate more holistically.

The interesting part is that getting from here to there isn't readily obvious to any of the stakeholders, not to educators, not to their intended audience and not to the companies that may be paying for softskills training.

There is no dearth of approaches to the problem: ignorance/denial (don't think about it and maybe it will go away ), traditional grammar & ESL classrooms, throw the non-native speakers in general communication with everyone else and hope they can figure out what words like "tonality" and "vocal variety" really mean ... huh??? or perhaps give them American Accent training because they aren't easy to understand.

The real answer is in exploring how to address communicative competence in the workplace. What is it? How does one acquire it? What if your family speaks only your language and you have no use for English outside of work? What if you live in a country that speaks English with a very different accent from the one you are attempting to learn? (like India or Jamaica).

There are a whole range of ways to address this issue that really don't differ in method from the standard way of approaching accent: first analyze speech, then create solutions that address systematic change, then implement them, then measure the results, then start all over again with "lessons learned" in mind.

Perhaps the bigger struggle is gaining corporate trust in offering this type of training. Without a history of past successes, it isn't likely to catch on or be easy to promote. It's much easier to apply a band-aid fix that everyone is familiar with. I remain optimistic and plan to focus on how to implement change, perhaps by taking "baby steps" to migrate gradually away from accent training to some degree, if only in mentality and focus, by including more application and exercise of learned concepts.

Currently I'm experimenting with an Indian audience to see how they react to communicative competence training. Details to follow ...