Guiding a conversation or an interview takes skill and tact.
Most non-native English speakers have trouble leading a conversation.
From my experience, even high-level students will wait until the native English speaker is completely finished talking before offering an opinion, and nearly everyone has a lot of trouble changing the course of the conversation.
Part of this is personality—some people are natural leaders, and other are not. But eventually everyone should be able to lead a conversation where they want to go. The steps to do this are relatively simple:
- respond to what the other person said;
- add information or a reason about why you want to change topics; and
- ask a question or make a comment.
Let's look at this short example:
Tom: So, I went to the project planning meeting this morning, and we were talking about our targets for this next quarter, and I'm gonna be honest, they were quite a bit higher than I expected...
Jerry: Wow, sounds tough, but I'm actually wondering if we should get down to business.
Tom: Oh, right. Sounds good.
Jerry: Okay, so let’s take a look at this document.
We can see Tom wanted to talk about the meeting, but that Jerry kindly but firmly steered the conversation back to the topic at hand—the document.
It is easier said than done, but we are here to help.
Introducing the Expert Interviews course
Today, we have published the first lesson in a new short course to help you interview experts in English. The Expert Interviews for Consultants course will help you:
- ask questions politely;
- confirm and react naturally to information; and
- steer the conversation.
We look forward to seeing you in class!