![]() He’s got no self-awareness, no thoughts about his own mistakes.” He’s entirely focused on the person that he’s speaking to and the result he wants to get. This is the same attitude that people like Faisal have when they speak English.” Just like the lousy player, when Faisal enters an English conversation, she explains, “he doesn’t feel judged. Pascal says, “I suddenly realized, this is it. There was no shyness.” Instead, he was focused completely on the task at hand: shooting his opponents. But at the same time, she saw something remarkable: “Even though this guy was terrible, even though his friends were watching him, there was no embarrassment. The person sitting next to her was playing a shoot-’em-up game while his friends watched, and he just wasn’t a very good player. Still, that didn’t answer her question - while she now knew what made some people struggle, she didn’t quite know what made other people succeed. The same thing happens to English learners, Pascal realized: “A lot of Malaysians, I noticed, had this idea of what good, proper English is supposed to sound like … and what their English sounded like, and how far they’d have to go to get there.” Pascal says, “My daughter, she knew what good piano sounded like, right? Because we’ve all heard good piano, and she knew what her level was, and she knew how long she’d have to play for, to play like that.” The second similarity had to do with self-image. Pascal adds, “Now at the same time, I noticed that a lot of Malaysians went into English conversations with the same sort of feeling of dread– this … feeling that they were going to be judged by how many mistakes they were going to make and whether or not they were going to screw up.” As she puts it, “she was filled with this … dread because it was all about not screwing up, right? To both my daughter and her teacher, her success in piano was measured by how few mistakes she made.” Pascal says her daughter hated piano, hated the lessons, and hated practicing. The first similarity had to do with the fear of being wrong. She recalls, “My daughter at that time was taking piano lessons, and I started to notice two really strong similarities between my daughter’s attitude or thinking towards playing the piano and a lot of Malaysians’ thinking or attitude towards English.” ![]() Despite not knowing much English, she says, “this guy could just sit and listen to anybody very calmly, clearly, and then he could respond absolutely express his thoughts beautifully.” She’d also observed some students in the opposite situation - people who knew quite a bit of English but who struggled to make themselves understood. She recalls one specific student named Faisal, who was a factory supervisor. Over time, she’s discovered a surprising truth: How well somebody communicates in a new language has very little to do with their language level - and a lot more to do with their attitude.Īs a teacher, she’d noticed that some students had a relatively low command of English but could still communicate very effectively. Pascal has spent 20 years in Malaysia helping people speak better English. But as it turns out, however, we’d benefit by shifting our focus and worry less about getting it right, according to communication skills trainer Marianna Pascal in a TEDxPenangRoad Talk. If we make a mistake or say something wrong, we wince, freeze up, and judge ourselves harshly. When we’re studying a new language, many of us approach it with fear and trepidation. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community browse through all the posts here. Melissa McFeeters Instead of looking at a foreign language as an art to be mastered and perfected, think of it as a tool you can use to get a result, says communication skills trainer Marianna Pascal.
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