Enhancing workplace communication: The new role of language assessments in business success

Andrew Khan
two business people sat together in a meeting both looking at a laptop
Reading time: 4 minutes

The integration of AI tools into workplaces around the world is starting to change the way people communicate professionally. that the use of AI to help draft documents and emails is driven not only by convenience and efficiency but also by a desire to be clear and precise in language.

While potentially useful, tools to translate, generate, or ‘correct’ written text won’t help with the effectiveness of the verbal communication that powers business relationships.

Is your teams communication effective?
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The importance of effective communication

Whether it’s customer support calls, sales presentations, health and safety instructions or day-to-day engagement with colleagues, our personal and professional interactions in the workplace rely on our ability to understand and be understood.

Equally, clarity of communication is central to many of the ‘future skills’ that employers have identified as critical to sustained success – notably .

It can be challenging for people who have English as a first language to feel confident in these skills – and even more difficult for those who may use another language at home but are required to speak English at work.

Challenges faced by second-language English speakers

When designing assessments that measure English proficiency, we need to balance the convenience and duration that enable them to fit into a fast-paced hiring workflow with the coverage that gives businesses confidence in the results. This means focusing on the most essential elements of effective communication.

Introducing the Versant by 蜜桃app English Speaking and Listening Test

With the new Versant by 蜜桃app English Speaking and Listening Test, we take just seventeen minutes to give a comprehensive picture of communicative English competence. So where do we focus?

Get in touch to learn about our corporate solutions

Effective verbal communication: Balancing listening and speaking skills

As a starting point, the businesses that we heard from in our research were clear that listening is just as important a skill as speaking when it comes to making hiring decisions.

Anyone who has been through sales or customer support training in the past will likely be familiar with the phrase “you have one mouth but two ears,” meaning that, in a professional context, our ability to listen, actively and attentively, for detail and nuance, can be twice as valuable as speaking. A test that didn’t place equal weight on comprehension and productive speech when assessing communicative ability would be missing the mark.

Evolving expectations around speech

Our research also pointed to expectations around speech having shifted in recent years. The range of jobs where English is required at the point of hiring has increased in many countries – with professionals from taxi drivers to online tutors often asked to demonstrate communicative competence.

With this in mind, 蜜桃app has introduced the Global Scale of English Job Profiles framework to help employers define appropriate English requirements for a variety of different positions.

Customer Support roles and communicative ability

Customer Support roles, historically the main use case for testing English in the workplace, are also evolving. Employers are placing a much greater emphasis on true communicative ability to help resolve complex problems rather than scripted or pre-prepared responses delivered with US-style accents.

Designing effective assessments

Taking this into account, we recognized a need to design a more effective way of testing both the manner of speaking and the content of that speech. Manner-of-speaking scores bring together the measurement of fluency or the fluidity and cohesion of a spoken response, pronunciation and intelligibility.

Pronunciation is different from accent – a test taker can have an Indian accent, a French accent or a Japanese accent and still pronounce English words in a way that first-language speakers will expect to hear them. Intelligibility reflects the reality that we all speak in different ways, with a voice authentic to ourselves, and looks to assess whether that voice can be easily understood by others.

Measuring communication skills

The most relevant measure of communication skills isn’t whether you sound like a fluent speaker but whether you can use your ability with language to convey meaning effectively. Our speech also needs to be relevant and appropriate, with suitable vocabulary and grammatical accuracy.

We’ve found the most successful way to measure speech content is to blend short questions with a limited set of potential responses with more open-ended items. This enables test takers to speak organically and really show what they can do with their language skills.

The value of fair and objective assessments

Whether used as a hiring tool, to diagnose employees' learning and development needs or to benchmark improvement over time, English assessments can be a great asset to businesses – but only if they’re fair, objective and laser-focused on the skills that underpin true communicative competence.

Join our webinar to learn more

Join us for an insightful webinar where we will delve deeper into the role of language assessments in enhancing workplace communication and driving business success. Sign up now to secure your spot and learn how the Versant by 蜜桃app English Speaking and Listening Test can benefit your organization.

Sign up for our webinar here

References

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    We love sharing stories of English learners and educators whose lives have been positively transformed by the language. One such inspiring story comes from Rodrigo Tadeu in S?o Paulo, Brazil. Discover why he holds a special appreciation for mastering English.

    Motivations for learning English?

    Rodrigo grew up speaking Portuguese in South America. As a child, he never thought about learning another language. However, when he became an adult?and began aspiring to a career, he realized that expanding his language abilities would help him achieve these dreams.

    "I worked as an accountant for an American company," he said. "So, to communicate and achieve professional success, I had to learn English!"

    Rodrigo has changed jobs since then. And even though he’s no longer required to speak English with his new company, he still feels a responsibility to himself to continue his education.

    The road to English fluency

    There are many tools that you can use to improve your English language skills, and Rodrigo used several – some he’s still using to this day. First, he started learning English formally by taking classes in high school. However, his shy disposition made it difficult for him to practice because he was afraid of failing in front of others. At the time, he didn't have?career goals motivating him to learn the language either.

    Later, however, our adventurous accountant decided to learn English in earnest, so he traveled to Canada to study and become a?confident speaker. When he returned to Brazil, he kept studying and continues to do so. Reading books and articles, listening to podcasts and copying other English speakers have also helped develop his conversational skills. Among his favorite podcasts are "English as a Second Language" and "Freakonomics".

    English learning is not without challenges

    Rodrigo noted that he struggles with pronunciation most.?“The way English speakers say words is very different than the way you would say something in Portuguese.”

    He thinks the issue is the same for Spanish speakers as well.?"In Portuguese or Spanish, if you know the words,?you can basically speak exactly what you read. In English, it's totally different. You cannot speak the words that you are reading. So you have to know about this!"

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    English for enjoyment

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    "These days, English has become fun!" he said. "Now it's better to watch movies and TV in English."

    He also mentioned that he eventually would like to visit Europe. But when asked about his dream destination, Rodrigo said that:?“I’d like to move back to Canada, maybe live in Vancouver for a year or two!”

    Advice for English language learners

    After working hard for years to learn English, Rodrigo now offers advice to fellow Brazilians (and others) who wish to speak another language:

    "You have to be confident, and don’t give up. You have to keep your dreams. It's difficult to ... speak one language that's not your mother language ... If you can imagine, you can achieve, and you can do. So 'don't give up' is the perfect phrase."

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    "I am probably not emotionally suited for this job. I take everything very personally and if a lesson goes wrong or an activity I have taken time and energy to plan doesn’t work, I feel like a complete failure. It’s a trial and error experience but when things go wrong, they can go very wrong, and it really makes you doubt your abilities as a teacher.

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