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Rosemary, what are the most common situations where people have problems in communicating?

Well, probably one of the main situations where people have problems communicating is where they are unsure of who they are talking to. So for instance, going to a party and it’s a room full of strangers, people you have never ever met before, that generally for most people will prove to be a little bit of a difficult situation. Erm, I suppose the second area is where people are unsure of what they’re talking about, so the content worries them for whatever reason. And the third area is where we are in a situation of speaking to an audience who we perceive are very different to us, so they are different in terms of their age, their experience, or their status.

So that’s quite general so why don’t we can we think of a specific example, may be that party again?

Oh, let’s suppose you are ern introduced to someone, again a total stranger, you have never met them before and you don’t know them, erm, you are introduced to them and you from the introduction you gather that they are actually quite an important person, they have got high status, they are very experienced, they are much older than you and all of a sudden you think “My goodness, why would they possibly want to listen to me?” and we feel totally lacking in confidence.

Erm, in that situation what are, what are the most common mistakes they are going to make?

Probably one of the most common mistakes will be they would want to speak too much, they would say too much. Er, all this information would come out of their mouths er but what they really should be doing in that situation is asking some questions to get the other person talking to them, not too many questions because if we ask too many questions it sounds like an interrogation, but getting the balance right between giving some information but also asking for information as well as through questioning. Probably one of the other things they would do tied into that, would they wouldn’t they wouldn’t pause enough. They wouldn’t erm stop to allow the other person to reflect on what they have said and to give them time to think about what they are going to say next, and to reflect on what is being said to them. So that would be something we need to be careful of and to always remember that when we do pause when we communicate. It will seem a lot, seem quite a length of time to us but it won’t to the person we’re speaking to.

And what about eye contact?

Well, if we don’t look at someone they immediately think that they can’t trust us or we are not telling the truth, so eye contact is very important. We have got to make sure we get it right… if we give too much they could perceive that we er we rather like them as little too much, or maybe we are being a little aggressive towards them. So we have got to get the eye contact about right, about three seconds in general is about right before we move away from the face then come back to the eyes.

A situation I often find I have trouble with is when I need to complain about something. What sort of mistakes might I be making?

Well I think it’s very common to feel uncomfortable about making a complaint. Probably one of the most common things that people do in that situation is they’re tempted to say far too much, so they become very unclear about the nature of the complaint… they are not precise enough. And they may well be tempted to speak far too quickly as well because actually we want to get to the end of the complaint because we don’t particularly like complaining in the first place. We may also fall into the trap of not listening enough to what the other person has said because actually we may be becoming emotional too and therefore we listen less actively to what the person’s saying to us and they in tern may not listen very well to us either so the whole erm complaint may become totally out of hand and we may end up completely falling out with one another. So, that’s probably why complaints can be very difficult to er to handle.

So those are the problems you might encounter when you’re complaining. How do you make a successful complaint?

Well, the first thing to do is to think and plan how you’re going to voice your concerns. So don’t go straight into it – you’ve really got to think and consider what’s going what needs to be said. Make sure the sentences are short. Take out any language which could be seen as being emotional and irritating to the other party. And then wait and be prepared to get a response from the other person whom you’ve made the complaint to – and really listen, actively, to what they are saying and summarise or test your understanding of what they’ve said to make sure you totally understand their point of view.

And when you summarise something, how, how do you do that effectively?

Well, if you think of summarizing as being simply restating, in a more compact form, what the other person has said to you, so that you’ve included all the key things and make sure that you’ve understood exactly what they’re saying to you. So restating in a compact form what’s been said to us.

How do you summarise, why good communication is so important?

Because in whatever situation we’re in we always have to deal with people and we have to communicate with people. And if we’re going to get the best out of people and build relationships successfully, whether it be at work or in a social situation, we need to have good communication skills and we mustn’t think that good communication skills are something we all naturally have… it’s something that we all need to work on to make sure that we build good relationships.