There are only two situations I can think of when I had to deal with language.

The first was in my sales career, where I had occasion to work with people in the Chicago market whose first language was Spanish, Korean, Polish, Chinese – quite an array. It was difficult. I was not prepared for it and struggled to make myself understood. It was quite frustrating not being able to understand the customer. But with practice I managed to get by.

Now, I’ve started a LinkedIn Group where people have joined from all over the world. Although they all write and most likely speak English quite well, I am very careful to avoid slang and idiom in my group postings, as I imagine those things would be difficult for members to understand.

I look forward to returning very much, especially to having more open conversation in the workplace (open conversation with colleagues in Korea is very difficult due to language barriers).

I also look forward to being able to communicate at normal speed using regular words – at the moment, in order to facilitate student understanding, I have to speak very slowly in the classroom and I have to limit my speech to short sentences using very simple and basic words and expressions.

I certainly look forward to being able to speak normally again!

I am curious, and I think I may have asked you this before, but I can’t remember – throughout your professional life, have you often had to deliver presentations to audiences where a high portion of the audience were not native English speakers? If so, have you had to adjust your message in order to cater for limitations in English proficiency of your audience?

With respect to your point about teaching, I would say that you are probably right, and I think that the reasons for this would boil down to at least two key factors:

(1) Lack of variation in audiences.

I could only imagine that in a profession like yours, you would have had to at various stages make one on one presentations, presentations in front of a large group as well as presentations to audiences of varying ages, income levels, levels of professional education and technical expertise, and differing levels of seniority and authority within organizations, as well as presentations in settings which vary in terms of their level of formality.

Accordingly, in the area of sales presentations, it certainly makes a great deal of sense to develop the ability to customize one’s presentation style to suit the audience and the setting to a certain degree.

This is not so much the case in teaching. Personally, in my first three years of teaching in Korea, I taught in a middle school environment on an almost exclusive basis, and whilst some classes tended to have students of a higher level of confidence and achievement than others, there was not a great deal of variety in terms of the characteristics of each class (all students were of similar ages, racial and social economic backgrounds and from the same area).

In this environment, I have found that there was not a great need to adjust the temperament of the lesson since the temperament of the audience did not vary a great deal from class to class.

(2) Volume of class instruction time.

Teachers are typically teaching for twenty to thirty classes per week, and given this volume of presentation time, along with the workflow requirements associated with related tasks such as marking of tests and homework assignments, it would be very difficult from a workflow perspective to prepare presentations of a substantially different nature and style to each individual class. Accordingly, teachers need to develop some form of standardization in terms of their presentation approach if they are to manage adequately from a workflow perspective.

So yes, I would imagine that over time, it would be possible for these factors to manifest themselves in a somewhat reduced degree of flexibility in terms of presentation style as teachers progress throughout their careers.
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