Autumn and asking for clarification!
Chris Bate
Business English coach - helping Spanish-speaking business professionals to overcome their fears and communicate their message with confidence and clarity in English ?? ???????????? your business English potential
How is your week going? I'm having a good one!?
Autumn has arrived with a bang here in Mallorca and I'm really appreciating the cooler weather! It's definitely my favourite season for exploring the island (equal with Spring)
It's also a great time to renew your commitment to your English! Similar to January, many people start or restart their English studies at this time. In the last couple of weeks I've begun working with some great people who are highly?motivated to improve their English!?
There are some fundamentals to my coaching which we always work on in our first sessions. One of these?is empowering my coachees to be able to say the right things in order to check understanding and clarify. So simple, yet I see it done so badly all the time!
Now here's a situation which has happened a few times in my years of coaching English???
A long pause, followed by "eh?". This was the response from my coachee?after I asked her a question about her latest project.
Is this a professional response? ?? Definitely not! ?? (But we'll forgive her as it was one of our first sessions together.)
There will always be times when you don't understand something, and it's perfectly ok to ask for clarification.
Let's look at some simple ways you can use to check understanding and get clarification.
So, if you didn't hear well: you could use a simple "Sorry what was that?" or perhaps "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Could you say it again please?"
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领英推荐
If you didn't understand, you could try - "Sorry, but what do you mean by ....?". Or maybe - "Sorry, but I'm not following you. Could you just clarify what you mean?"
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Another really effective way to check understanding, is to paraphrase what the person said. If someone said to you -"Please ping me your ideas by the end of play", you could respond by saying - "So, if I understand correctly, you want me to send you my ideas by the end of the working day"
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Try some of these out the next time you don't understand something (it's better than saying 'eh?' ??).
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Would you like to renew your commitment to your English learning?
If so, then get in touch! I'd be happy to talk to you about building a personalised one-to-one coaching program based on your needs and objectives for your English.
Have a great weekend!
Ingeniero Ambiental
2 年An amazing way to show us how to answer, thanks for dedicate your time in these useful and excellent posts ??!
Attorney At Law at CIVIL COURT CASES
2 年Very nice
Departamento Técnico Comercial
2 年Perfect...! and thank you so much for sharing and clarifying how to answer a question, it is so useful in my day to day life.