How do you tactfully suggest that someone would benefit from making their accent more clear?

Question

I was recently trying to help someone to identify skills that would help them to find a job. This individual is very technically capable so is seeking a technical role. They learned English as a second language and have a strong accent that can be difficult for a native English speaker to understand.

This individual was happy for me to suggest technical skills that they could improve, however when I suggested that making their accent more clear could help them to find a job, they were very offended. At the time, I viewed verbal and technical skills equally, however in hindsight, I now see that verbal skills can be more personal so I appreciate how I did not make this suggestion in the most tactful way. My intentions were just to try and help this person, not to upset them.

Contrary to popular belief, technical skill is only a very small part of technical roles. The majority is actually interpersonal, so clear communication is key. I was only trying to explain this, I did not want to offend. How do I politely and kindly explain this next time?

Just to be clear, I have apologised to the person and assured them that I do respect their skills. I am now trying to understand how I can improve for the future.

Answer 1

As someone who speaks their second language with a fairly strong accent... it's very difficult to bring this up without being offensive.

Learning a language is extremely difficult. Changing your accent is nearly impossible. After eleven years, I still get pegged immediately as being American (or, in some cases, people think I'm French).

I can tell you from first-hand experience that people who speak with a heavy accent are well aware of that fact and are probably embarrassed about it. After all, why would someone choose to intentionally speak with an accent that makes it harder for others to understand?
Just telling them "you need to lighten up your accent" isn't going to help and is going to just cause hurt.

I don't know how close you are with the subject of the question, but unless you're extremely close friends comments about their accent directly will not go over well.

Instead, what I would have found more agreeable would be to talk about communication without specifically mentioning accents. Suggest speaking perhaps a little more slowly, or planning out what they want to say before actually saying it - basic communication skills that will help regardless of if you have a strong accent, and can help even more if you do have one.

In my experience, talking directly about someone's accent is not your place to do. Instead, talk about something that would be actually possible for the other person to work on.

Answer 2

They can do better

As a French working abroad, I'll take the opposite stance to the current answers: it is important to mention to them that they are hard to understand.

If you've ever heard the average French attempting to speak English, well, you probably know we're not really good at it. English is taught very much in writing in France, and this means our oral communication -- both listening and speaking -- is typically subpar compared to many of our European neighbors, and of course native speakers.

There is, however, no reason this has to be, and this cannot be improved. Like any other skill, it's a matter of training.

But is the accent the matter?

SBI: Situation, Behavior, Impact

Many people used to tell me that my accent was difficult to understand. The problem, though, is that accent is an umbrella term covering many pieces, and therefore this piece of feedback is imprecise.

A framework to provide feedback is SBI (Situation, Behavior, Impact) which aims at anchoring feedback on a concrete instance of the problem, which can be analyzed in more depth than vague "bad accent".

So, rather than complain about "bad accent", which is close to unactionable and therefore will likely lead to disappointment, and possibly anger, it's important to focus on specific words. Later, with a professional, they should be able to identify trends, and address them.

In my case, a clear example was my pronunciation of floor as flour. Needless to say this confused my listeners. They could work it out, but it took more energy, and if there was another few words that also needed working out, they lost the thread of the conversation.

This problem was reported to me, I sought professional help, and trained to address:

1. My pronunciation; making sure to clearly distinguish the consonants and get the vowels right.
2. My vocabulary: because English is dumb and there's no generic rule for how a word is pronounced, it needs to be learned.

Those are clear, actionable, points of feedback that I could and did address.

And now, most people don't complain about my accent, though natives can still generally tell I'm French.

Answer 3

When you say "I suggested that making their accent more clear" did you actually say "you need to make your accent more clear"? Because that's not something that's actionable.

For me, the advice I have received that I have found helpful is to suggest specific pronunciation (in my case was about the pronunciation of "t" in "city", "pity", etc. in American English, which does not exist in my native language) and how to fix it. This entirely depends on the native language of the person, so you need to know their native language, and then find specific pronunciation that you find can be improved, and suggest that.

You can start by a comparison with how native speakers pronounce that sound, and compare how they pronounce it, and how to fix it.

On the flip side, though, I believe figuring which sounds need to be fixed might require some linguistics knowledge of what made their accent an accent. I, for example, didn't know that my way of pronunciating "city" is different from how native speakers pronounce it, and only realized this after the advice was given to me, which was explained specifically for people speaking my native language trying to speak English. So if you want to give specific advice like I mentioned above, perhaps you might need to do some researching first on what are the common differences (perhaps calling it "differences" instead of "problems" might convey it better) between the person's native language and English.

Answer 4

Sadly, many people who bring up the topic are approaching it from a standpoint that's ungenerous at best, and I think there is rather a lack of accepted idiom to discuss this professionally.

What I'd ask is whether you honestly had trouble understanding some of this person's speech, or whether you understood them just fine but feared that others might have difficulty. If it's the former, then what I'd recommend is that as each incident occurred, you politely ask for clarification. As in (for one example from my own experience) "sorry, are talking about metrics or a matrix?"). If the speaker finds themselves asked this frequently, it's up to them to undertake further pronunciation work. It also identifies particular words they can take to a language coach for focused effort.

If there's enough of this that the resulting delays result in less discussion of the person's skills in a given interview, then their language proficiency has limited their skills assessment. An interviewer may need to simply write "unable to assess" in some cases. It's really up to the speaker to decide whether their language skills are what's holding them back.

If it's the latter, if you were basically able to understand them, then I would recommend doing nothing. There is no real reason to think that any future co-worker (or interviewer, or client) will have any more trouble than you do. And if (as may be the case here) they approached you specifically in the context of their technical skills, then other aspects of their presentation may simply be off the table, whether it's their pronunciation or their mismatched jacket and pants.