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The HBR Channel: Why Everyone at Your Company Should Speak (A Little) English

 
Podcast Transcript
SG:Hi I’m Sarah Green. I’m here today with Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely. Thanks so much for coming in.
TN: Thanks for having me.
SG: You’ve made the case that companies should have a common language. What’s the benefit for companies of having a common language?
TN: Well, companies need a language strategy, especially if they have any type of global aspirations. When you have an employee base that’s spread across the world, across geographies, across national boundaries, you need to find a way to get them to communicate and how do you do that if you don’t have some form of a language strategy or a common language? And what’s happening too today is that companies are very quickly starting to adopt English as a common language or a lingua franca is the term as well and they’re doing that in order to serve customers, in order to have better partner relationships and their competitors are doing it as well.
SG: You made the case that English should be that lingua franca. Why English and not say, a language like Mandarin?
TN: It’s a great question. I’m not the one who is selecting the choice for a common language. English is actually a common language of business today and so when I talk about language strategies oftentimes interchangeable with the English language. And the question of Mandarin comes out often. People think, you know, China is rising and will it one day take over in the language choice? And I argue that for now it won’t, because English has some advantages that for example Mandarin doesn’t. The English language has had a massive head start and be imbedded around the world through the colonial history of the British and the American spread of its culture. Mandarin, on the other hand, you have less people around the world who are not from that region who speak it, and the second thing is that it’s much more difficult, it’s easier for people to speak broken English than it is broken Mandarin.
SG: That’s a really good point. So when companies are deciding whether they need a language strategy like that? Do they need to, do all companies need one or just multinationals? What if a company is only based in the US?
TN: The companies with a global strategy need a language strategy, anytime you’re extending beyond your domestic place and you’re interacting with people with different language backgrounds then you need a language strategy. If a company is focused domestically only, it becomes less important but what I’m finding is, customers are getting spread around the world.
SG: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the implementation challenges with the language strategy. It seems like the kind of thing that could rub people the wrong way, if they have a strong sense of cultural identity and you’re asking them to learn another language for their job that seems like a sensitive issue.
TN: That’s exactly right. One of the reasons I argue in this article is that companies need to be very thoughtful in not only determining their language strategy but also implementing it, is because this is one of the toughest most radical things a company can ask their employees: to change a language but I’ve developed an adoption framework that caters to the needs of employees so that they don’t feel that their identities are being water down but instead they’re gaining a new skill that enhances their personal as well as their professional advancement. When you select an English language strategy, you’re feeling to work hard to make sure that your native speakers, American, your speakers from the UK, your speakers from Australia begin to communicate in ways that accommodate others so language strategies are also about insuring that everyone is involved in building up the linguistic capacity of a company. Native speakers have a big role to play.
SG: Could you just tell us a little bit about what you mean by how native speakers can help in that way?
TN: For one, native speakers can’t show up in a mixed language environment or mixed language skilled environment and speak as they do among themselves. They need to slow down, they need to use different vocabulary to accommodate others, they need to help their coworkers to communicate better, they literally have to change their communication behaviors in order to accommodate non-native speakers but what you find oftentimes is that native speakers continue on business as usual and that doesn’t work so they need to dial down while non-native speakers dial up and managers actually have to fully manage the processes of communication when you have people of all levels of fluency interacting in a common language.
SG: Well Tsedal, thanks so much for talking with us today about this.
TN: Thank you.

Quiz 0001: 'WHETHER OR NOT' and 'EVEN IF'

Quiz 0001: WHETHER OR NOT and EVEN IF » create exam

The Bilingual Brain Is Sharper and More Focused, Study Says - Health Blog - WSJ

April 30, 2012, 5:01 PM ET From The Wall Street Journal

The ability to speak two languages can make bilingual people better able to pay attention than those who can only speak one language, a new study suggests.

Scientists have long suspected that some enhanced mental abilities might be tied to structural differences in brain networks shaped by learning more than one language, just as a musician’s brain can be altered by the long hours of practice needed to master an instrument.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Northwestern University for the first time have documented differences in how the bilingual brain processes the sounds of speech, compared with those who speak a single language, in ways that make it better at picking out a spoken syllable, even when it is buried in a babble of voices.

That biological difference in the auditory nervous system appears to also enhance attention and working memory among those who speak more than one language, they say.

“Because you have two languages going on in your head, you become very good at determining what is and is not relevant,” says Dr. Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern, who was part of the study team. “You are a mental juggler.”

In the new study, Kraus and her colleagues tested the involuntary neural responses to speech sounds by comparing brain signals in 23 high school students who were fluent in English and Spanish to those of 25 teenagers who only spoke English. When it was quiet, both groups could hear the test syllable — “da” — with no trouble, but when there was background noise, the brains of the bilingual students were significantly better at detecting the fundamental frequency of speech sounds.

“We have determined that the nervous system of a bilingual person responds to sound in a way that is distinctive from a person who speaks only one language,” Kraus says.

Through this fine-tuning of the nervous system, people who can master more than one language are building a more resilient brain, one more proficient at multitasking, setting priorities, and, perhaps, better able to withstand the ravages of age, a range of recent studies suggest.

Indeed, some preliminary research suggests that people who speak a second language may have enhanced defenses against the onset of dementia and delay Alzheimer’s disease by an average of four years, as WSJ reported in 2010.

The ability to speak more than one language also may help protect memory, researchers from the Center for Health Studies in Luxembourg reported at last year.

After studying older people who spoke multiple languages, they concluded that the more languages someone could speak, the better: People who spoke three languages were three times less likely to have cognitive problems compared to bilingual people. Those who spoke four or more languages were five times less likely to develop cognitive problems.

Not so long ago, people worried that children who grew up learning two languages at once were at a developmental disadvantage compared with those who focused on only one.

New research suggests that even babies have little trouble developing bilingual skills.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre reported that babies being raised in a bilingual family show from birth a preference for each of the native languages they heard while still in the womb and can readily distinguish between them.

Moreover, bilingual infants appear to learn the grammars of their two languages as well as babies learning a single language, even when the two languages are as different from one another as English and Japanese, or English and Punjabi.