By LESTER CHANG
Susannah Raney started her Cupertino business, English as a Second Language Tutoring on Wheels, two and a half years ago to help foreign-born professionals reduce heavy accents that may impede their ability to communicate with potential clients.
Since then, she has found her services to be in high demand. She has helped 60 clients, mostly Taiwanese and Chinese, work toward solving their language problems.
In addition, she says, high-tech companies, banks and brokerage firms in Silicon Valley have consulted her to find ways to help such employees without offending them. In a time of corporate downsizing and layoffs, these companies are looking for every edge to remain competitive.
"These companies are frustrated," she says. "People don't have the time to try to figure out what [other] people are saying. They want to hear it clearly the first time. In business, this matters. It is money."
Raney says the companies she consults for balk at telling such employees about their shortcomings, mainly because they don't want to offend employees that are otherwise productive.
And this is where Raney's updated business programs come in: As a way to get to middle- and lower-management employees, she has proposed putting up posters describing her business' service in office buildings throughout the Santa Clara Valley. She is also designing newspaper ads with cartoons that carry subtle messages about words non-native English speakers commonly mispronounce, such as "impotent" instead of "important" and "mouse" instead of "mouth."
Raney has also sought out the help of Cupertino civil attorney Richard Abdalah to speak at gatherings on sexual harassment. In some cases, Raney says, people's mispronunciations can mistakenly offend the opposite sex. Episodes like these can lead to sexual harassment lawsuits and hefty court costs for companies dragged into court, she adds.
Raney cites the case of a top Santa Clara Valley businessman who approached a female employee and wanted six copies of a document for a meeting. Instead of saying "six," he uttered "sex," an error he didn't know he made, Raney says.
"It is obvious what the person meant," she adds, "but what he said came out totally different. And these mistakes are made by intelligent and successful people. It need not be."
In her program, which is open to all, she teaches students the rhythm of speech and how to familiarize themselves with jargon and slang used in U.S. offices.
Raney says she finds nothing wrong with accents, but they could become an impediment to professional and personal growth when they are so thick that a person can not be understood.
Most of Raney's clients are engineers or computer specialists who work in Silicon Valley. Because of their advanced degrees and high management positions, many don't believe they have any shortcomings in their professional careers, she says. Nevertheless, at business and social gatherings, they sometimes utter words that make them sound foolish, even when they don't know it.
Raney says many clients believe building a large vocabulary is one of the keys to success in the corporate world, but that belief couldn't be further from the truth.
"Building a huge vocabulary is not enough to bridge the gap between education and speaking well," she adds.
Among other things, Raney teaches students to become aware of sloppy colloquialisms and to grasp informal office language, such as "9 to 5" or "bigwig," and computer terms like "boot" and "glitch."
Her classes are taught in the American Executive buildings in San Jose and Cupertino on Saturday and Sunday. The program runs for eight sessions, and students can get more coaching if they desire, Raney said.
This article appeared in the Cupertino Courier, June 19, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.