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An incoming international grad student concerned about listening & speaking English fluency

In our new “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I’m an Asian student and was fortunate to receive a strong offer this application cycle. I’ll be starting a PhD in the U.S. in Fall 2026. However, I’m very worried about language issues. In philosophy, classroom discussion is extremely important, and I know my spoken English will never be as fluent as that of native speakers. My reading and writing skills are actually very strong, but my listening and speaking are quite weak. In my home country, no one speaks English to me in daily life, and I’ve basically never had real opportunities to speak it out loud.

Sometimes I really miss how articulate and intelligent I sound in my native language… In English, I feel like a much less capable version of myself. Do professors tend to doubt a PhD student’s academic ability if their spoken English isn’t very good? Will limited oral fluency be interpreted as limited intellectual ability?

Do any readers have any helpful experiences or insights to share?

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11 responses to “An incoming international grad student concerned about listening & speaking English fluency”

  1. academic migrant

    Asian and second language speaker here. Unfortunately, your worries are very well founded. And even if you speak excellent English, sometimes you will notice that before you speak, you are being treated as if you are invisible. Had the fun experience of having my hand up the whole Q&A and being ignored until some well established philosopher called out the chair for ignoring me. Had the fun experience of having several of my questions dismissed in Q&A as being unintelligible, yet having some nice academics after me repeat my questions for me, and giving me the credit.

    But that’s enough ranting. Some tips. Read a lot, not just academic stuff. Read novels and literature. Listen to audiobooks. (Check whether your local library has them for free, because they can be rather expensive.) Read local news, lots of them. Make friends and socialise in English. Surround yourself in an environment to improve your listening and speaking skills. You will sacrifice a lot, but some of these skills can help you overcome some very very explicit biases, and who knows when they will make a difference in hiring decisions? The world isn’t fair, so complain; but don’t just complain.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I second everything that has been said here.

      Hi! I am a non-native English speaker with a US PhD and now Assistant Professor at R1. Unfortunately, some professors will assume “lack of proficiency” from your accent. You can work hard to change it now, but even if you do nothing, once you are in the US you will quickly become better at English. It took me a year to go from mastery to actual fluency (always with an accent, I never changed that).
      One thing that you cannot control is the faces that others make when they try to understand what you are saying. Some people are very bad at decoding accents, and most have no idea they are frowning. Interpret this gesture input not affectively (“they dislike me,” “am I an idiot?”) but epistemically (“I should rephrase what I just said and perhaps go slower”).

      Welcome!

      Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I’m not a native English speaker and did my PhD in English (in continental Europe). I had similar worries when I first started. You’ll notice that your English will improve a lot once you move and start not only reading but *speaking* it on a daily basis. It takes a while but eventually your brain changes gear, so to speak. Whether you’ll become more articulate in EN than in your native language is tough to say – I haven’t.

    It’s not a big deal where I work, since most faculty are not native English speakers. That might be different in the US.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    I think that, in the age of chatbots, some professors will be skeptical when they notice a mismatch between written and spoken English. (GRE scores might allay this suspicion.) They are probably less likely to make judgments about intellectual ability. I realize this is a good news/bad news statement.

    OP wasn’t really asking for advice, but here is some unsolicited advice anyway.

    You have a few months to practice speaking and listening to English. If you’re still in school, are there other students around who are headed to English-speaking countries and would also like to practice? Are you watching English-language television and listening to English-language podcasts?

    One thing you might try when you get here is writing stuff down ahead of time. I mean even in class, if you can: jot down a few words about what you want to say so you don’t have to do it on the fly. (This is a strategy I learned from an undergrad student who was nervous about speaking up. Writing it down helped them feel prepared to contribute.) Classroom discussion is important, but you’ll see when you get there that spontaneous contributions aren’t the only way to be a good philosopher.

    You’ll get better as you have more opportunities!

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    I am a non-native speaker from an Asian country. I think two concerns need to be distinguished: how others might think of your intellectual abilities, and how you might improve your intellectual abilities.

    OP’s questions, “”Do professors tend to doubt a PhD student’s academic ability if their spoken English isn’t very good? Will limited oral fluency be interpreted as limited intellectual ability?”, seem about how other might judge one’s own abilities. I do not think this is a concern nowadays. I feel that most professors are sympathetic and won’t connect your oral communication skills with your intellectual abilities. At most, they might think you are not competent to *teach* philosophy in the English-speaking environment, since the teaching skills rely heavily on your listening and speaking. Other than that, I doubt anyone would judge your abilities as a philosopher based on how good your speaking and listening is.

    However, I do think that your listening competency might be a potential obstacle to your own learning process. As you said, philosophy courses include a lot of discussions. If you cannot keep up with the in-class discussions, you may not get much from those courses. This is especially the case when others would probably not slow down and use simpler vocabularies just for you. (I scored close to 100% for my TOEFL but I could only understand around 50% of the in-class discussions when I started graduate school.) For this, I recommend listening to a ton of podcasts in philosophy and visiting office hours as much as you can.

    Reply
  5. Anonymous

    I try to make allowances for students who are not native English speakers–philosophy is hard already, so I really admire people who can do it in a second language. But, in the end, professors can only assess your actual performance, not your internal knowledge states. Improving your listening and speaking skills will no doubt increase your success.

    There are online tools that might help improve your English skills. (I’ve never used them, so I can’t recommend them, but an Internet search will lead you to YouTube, various apps, and AI practice tools.) There are also accent coaches and language tutors that can help with speaking skills once you arrive. In the meantime, listening to as much English as you can (podcasts, movies, audio books, etc.) could help train your ear. I bet there are other people where you live now who want to practice speaking English; you could try to find such a group, or perhaps hire an English-speaking tutor. When you are by yourself, you could read aloud in English.

    It won’t be easy, but since you already know the language you are starting from a position of strength. Good luck.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Also offering some unsolicited advice here. Although my situation is vastly different – I had to learn a third language for teaching purposes on a tight timeline – what worked wonders for improving my oral expression (which was my particular weakness, but it could also work for listening) was using a language learning chatbot. I used languatalk that I can vouch for, but I know there are other options on the market. The price is way lower than hiring a private tutor and the results have been unexpectedly good (I am saying this from the perspective of someone skeptical of the educational value of AI). Since you have no problems with grammar, reading, or writing, I imagine that using the software for conversation every day for at least 15 minutes could help before the start of the academic year. Even afterwards, you can use it for practicing presentations and such.

    Reply
  7. Lu

    I am a faculty at USC and I am a nonnative speaker. I can give some thoughts from both sides: an evaluator and an evaluatee. For background, my English was not great even by Chinese standard, and the *only* area I was strong at was reading when it came to English. All the other areas were weak (below average).

    “Do professors tend to doubt a PhD student’s academic ability if their spoken English isn’t very good?” No. But it will be noted as what it is and we will generally try to help you improve so that you will be competitive as a job candidate or otherwise reach your goal. For academic evaluations, writings are typically more important. As a student, I received way more criticisms on my writings than my orals, even though my writing was (and still is) stronger than my speaking.

    It should be noted that I have rarely received language criticisms in formal situations. In fact I cannot recall any such instance. This includes talks, interviews, referee reports and so on. This sort of explicit remarks would be probably deemed inappropriate.

    Reply
  8. Anon

    I’m a faculty member in a US PhD program. International students who arrive without great speaking and oral comprehension skills tend to improve rapidly. Immersion teaches these skills effectively. It takes time and a lot of effort, but students who come in with those issues typically catch up linguistically in the first few years. They also tend to do very well in the program, and in their subsequent careers.

    My department has, in a case-by-case way, discussed the challenges early year ESL students face. We are all aware of what’s going on, we have no trouble separating philosophical ability from speaking/listening (and to a lesser extent, writing) skills that are still developing, and we understand that developing the language skills is part of the process. It’s something we think is important, but it’s not something we judge or worry about. In contrast, we do worry about issues related to philosophical potential. I suspect the attitude my colleagues and I have on this front is pretty common across philosophy.

    For what it’s worth, I have a tremendous amount of respect for anyone who can do philosophy at a high level in a language they didn’t speak regularly in childhood. It’s an impressive skill. I think this is also a pretty common attitude amongst philosophers.

    Reply
  9. pfinocch89

    I’m a native English speaker who trains non-native speakers for this exact scenario. I agree with most of what others have said in the comments. One thing that hasn’t been mentioned yet: while professors are usually quite good about this sort of thing and usually have some experience with it, for some of your first-year cohorts you will be the first non-native speaker that they’ve ever spoken to. I suggest following Hanlon’s razor in that case. They literally have no idea what modulations in speech are required to make themselves sound intelligible to a more general audience. I still remember the first few months of hanging out with my college best friend. She wasn’t even a non-native speaker, just a bi-lingual Peruvian. But I had spent my entire life up to that point talking almost exclusively to people from Upstate New York. The amount of “what did you say?”s I got when I thought I was speaking perfectly clear was humbling.

    For my students, the speed of the conversations is usually the biggest challenge when they first arrive. They usually adapt within the first semester or two. That being said, it would be a much gentler transition if you can practice fast conversations. There’s really no other way to do this than finding a language partner ASAP. Even better if you can get that language partner to slur their words a bit.

    Reply
  10. Mike Titelbaum

    I want to emphasize something that has been gestured at in the comments above. If you are going to a program where you will be doing a lot of teaching (especially if you’ll be teaching as soon as you arrive), the most important reason to improve your listening and speaking is for the sake of your students. A huge amount of interaction with your students will be oral (they’ll rarely be reading things that you write!). If communication between you and them isn’t effective, this will affect your teaching evaluations, but more importantly it will affect how much they will be able to learn from you. Unlike faculty, students don’t always have the experience, patience, or even just the time to work through language challenges and find your true value. It isn’t fair that you have this extra obstacle to achieving effective teaching, but unfortunately the obstacle is there.

    Reply

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