Maintaining focus in second-language meetings
February 17, 2025 12:29 PM Subscribe
In my new position, I have to attend meetings that take place in French. I can follow the French only if I maintain absolutely disciplined focus on what is being said. How can I do that?
I am extremely prone to distraction -- something or someone catches my eye and my mind wanders. In English meetings, this isn't a huge deal, I can sort of replay what I have heard in my mind and catch up, but my French barely allows me to understand what is being said in the first place, never mind remember it and replay it while also listening to more things being said.
In English meetings where distraction is an issue, I maintain focus by taking notes, but I have tried that in French language meetings (with notes in both French and English) and it does not work, it is itself too distracting and I lose the train of the French.
These are usually virtual meetings, but occasionally in person. It is easier in person because I can maintain a creepy and overbearing level of eye-contact with the speaker, but that doesn't seem to work in virtual meetings, even if I try staring at the video of the other person.
What are some other focus tricks that won't themselves become a distraction?
I am extremely prone to distraction -- something or someone catches my eye and my mind wanders. In English meetings, this isn't a huge deal, I can sort of replay what I have heard in my mind and catch up, but my French barely allows me to understand what is being said in the first place, never mind remember it and replay it while also listening to more things being said.
In English meetings where distraction is an issue, I maintain focus by taking notes, but I have tried that in French language meetings (with notes in both French and English) and it does not work, it is itself too distracting and I lose the train of the French.
These are usually virtual meetings, but occasionally in person. It is easier in person because I can maintain a creepy and overbearing level of eye-contact with the speaker, but that doesn't seem to work in virtual meetings, even if I try staring at the video of the other person.
What are some other focus tricks that won't themselves become a distraction?
Maybe there’s a way to take notes that is less distracting- say, instead of writing out whole sentences you write a single word?
Since this is a new position, also just give yourself a little time to get acclimated to the process. And maybe practice with French language videos?
Also, not sure if this would be useful in the context of these meetings but might it be helpful to get recordings made that you can rewatch? Or automatic transciptions (never perfect but possibly useful)?
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:45 PM on February 17 [4 favorites]
Since this is a new position, also just give yourself a little time to get acclimated to the process. And maybe practice with French language videos?
Also, not sure if this would be useful in the context of these meetings but might it be helpful to get recordings made that you can rewatch? Or automatic transciptions (never perfect but possibly useful)?
posted by showbiz_liz at 12:45 PM on February 17 [4 favorites]
Also came here to suggest automatic captioning, if it's of good enough quality. It will catch your eye and also can be really helpful relieving cognitive load if you have issues parsing what was said. And if you can get a transcript made as the meeting progresses, you can refer to it to see what you missed.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:01 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:01 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
Response by poster: As a key player in the meetings, I need to be following along so I can contribute to the discussion during the meeting. Unfortunately recordings I can listen to after won't help with that. I will see what Teams can do with automated captioning, though, for the virtual sessions.
posted by jacquilynne at 1:09 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
posted by jacquilynne at 1:09 PM on February 17 [3 favorites]
Best answer: I taught English as a foreign language for a long time to adults as well as to kids and teens, and I tried really hard to help learners at basically any age and level of proficiency be able to focus and avoid distraction so they could absorb, and then contribute, as much as possible. I did this by adjusting my lesson plans to factor in ways to minimize a concept in the field called the affective filter. Effectively, an affective filter being present between teacher and learner can reduce a learner's sense of comfort and safety and perhaps even provoke anxiety, which leads both to poorer retention of new language material and poorer productive use of language. (If you'd like to read more about this, the affective-filter concept is part of "input hypothesis", which is explained on Wikipedia here.)
Now, of course, a weekly English-language class isn't the same as a meeting, and your colleagues are not your teachers, but I wondered if some of the focus-increasing, distraction-reducing, participant-calming strategies I used in all my lessons might be translatable to your situation. Many of these, in fact, look a lot like strategies anyone in an office with meetings like yours could deploy in the normal course of their everyday working life, without anyone else knowing they were there to support your French comprehension and production as well as the perception that you are just as competent as your colleagues.
Your goal in using strategies like these, then, wouldn't just be to increase your focus in the meetings; it would be to go to work knowing that engaging in the back-and-forth of remote meetings with an expectation that all participants are working at an essentially flaw-free level of French accuracy is actually possible. If that's what you're looking for, here are some specific strategies from the teaching world that might help you get there:
- I shared my lesson agenda with learners at the start of the lesson, ideally having it visible even before the lesson began. (This was possible even with young children using images and emoji to supplement text.)
In terms of your meeting agendas, how much is known to you in advance? If there's a way to increase the time between seeing the agenda and the start of the meeting, this might increase the amount of time your mind is free to wander (in French!) to what's going to be talked about and what you think might happen in the meeting itself. This would definitely help you be able to better prime yourself for what's going to be discussed as each part of the agenda is gone through: as your predicted ideas come up, you'll be ready to talk about them in a way you wouldn't be without that preparation. The goal here would be to reduce the (unconscious!) work your brain is doing to keep up in the moment, since it knows what's going to be talked about already, in addition to all the work it is doing to continue absorbing and processing the French. If accessing a formal agenda is impossible in advance, simply having a sticky note of items that you know inevitably will be discussed stuck to the edge of your screen could help.
- I used a lot of simple, clear, coherent visuals that had neither too little nor too much text, and I drafted my whiteboard work in advance to make sure I could support students with different levels of oral comprehension in note-taking, instruction-following and task completion.
Is there sufficiently clear visual support for the oral and written information being exchanged in the meetings? For example, if everyone is discussing last quarter's sales, is there a chart or table on the screen that everyone is referencing showing the numbers in question? If the meeting is taking place without slides, are there printed materials you are referencing? If there are visuals that you know will be discussed in the meeting, could you mark them up on a tablet or with a highlighter on paper so you're, again, primed to discuss the points you predict will come up before they actually are being said? Being able to reinforce what you are hearing with what you are seeing or reading can really help with your retention of (invisible) discussion around (visible) information, because, again, you don't need to expend the energy mentally to deal with the information solely orally if you have a visual to support you. If you're making the visuals, make them visually support your conversation around them. For example, maybe it's possible to more fluently answer your colleagues' questions about a dip in sales (or indeed guide them to that dip in sales) if you have marked the corresponding sales dip on the chart you are sharing by highlighting the dip in a different color.
- I made sure the classroom was designed to be free of distracting noise, light and interruption.
What else is happening in your space, on your devices, or on your screen during these meetings? If you're in a well-lit conference room, have a large-enough and clear-enough screen, a comfortable chair and all the notes and details you need at hand, that's a much simpler environment for the brain to absorb information in than on a laptop on a small table in a noisy café or at home with your phone pinging with other notifications and the neighbor's washing machine rattling your walls.
- I planned a lot of "silent" time into lessons so learners had mental space to process what I was teaching before and after they needed to use it in a productive capacity.
It may not be possible to change the content of the meetings or how much time is spent there, but it may be possible to give yourself more preparation and reflection time before and after the meetings to do whatever you need to do to help you be more "on" in the "productive" time of the meeting itself. Maybe this is a reminder that pops up on your phone a few days before the meeting to confirm over email with Co-Presenter X that Account Y or Colleague Z will be discussed; maybe it's keeping an "emergent needs" to-do list by your side in the meeting to have a place to deposit unaddressed ideas from conversations that can't be dealt with in the moment. Maybe it's just taking a short walk after the meeting instead of going back right away to other work, delaying whatever emergent work has come from the meeting until you've had time for your mind to settle.
- I briefly refreshed learners' knowledge from previous lessons before launching into new material.
Do your meetings contain any "tidying up" of the previous meeting's action items? If they don't, perhaps this could be a practice you do for yourself the day before the meeting in service of reducing the need to think on the spot. I found learners appreciated a bit of fun here, too, to help everyone relax a bit after being outside of our English-only classroom for a whole week; is there a culture in your office of the first people in the meeting chatting while they wait for others to arrive, or to go downstairs to the coffee shop in the lobby fifteen minutes beforehand with a colleague also going to the meeting to catch up on their week? Doing something like this with someone who'll be there as well could help your brain act as if it is in a safer, more familiar space.
Good luck!
posted by mdonley at 2:20 PM on February 17 [19 favorites]
Now, of course, a weekly English-language class isn't the same as a meeting, and your colleagues are not your teachers, but I wondered if some of the focus-increasing, distraction-reducing, participant-calming strategies I used in all my lessons might be translatable to your situation. Many of these, in fact, look a lot like strategies anyone in an office with meetings like yours could deploy in the normal course of their everyday working life, without anyone else knowing they were there to support your French comprehension and production as well as the perception that you are just as competent as your colleagues.
Your goal in using strategies like these, then, wouldn't just be to increase your focus in the meetings; it would be to go to work knowing that engaging in the back-and-forth of remote meetings with an expectation that all participants are working at an essentially flaw-free level of French accuracy is actually possible. If that's what you're looking for, here are some specific strategies from the teaching world that might help you get there:
- I shared my lesson agenda with learners at the start of the lesson, ideally having it visible even before the lesson began. (This was possible even with young children using images and emoji to supplement text.)
In terms of your meeting agendas, how much is known to you in advance? If there's a way to increase the time between seeing the agenda and the start of the meeting, this might increase the amount of time your mind is free to wander (in French!) to what's going to be talked about and what you think might happen in the meeting itself. This would definitely help you be able to better prime yourself for what's going to be discussed as each part of the agenda is gone through: as your predicted ideas come up, you'll be ready to talk about them in a way you wouldn't be without that preparation. The goal here would be to reduce the (unconscious!) work your brain is doing to keep up in the moment, since it knows what's going to be talked about already, in addition to all the work it is doing to continue absorbing and processing the French. If accessing a formal agenda is impossible in advance, simply having a sticky note of items that you know inevitably will be discussed stuck to the edge of your screen could help.
- I used a lot of simple, clear, coherent visuals that had neither too little nor too much text, and I drafted my whiteboard work in advance to make sure I could support students with different levels of oral comprehension in note-taking, instruction-following and task completion.
Is there sufficiently clear visual support for the oral and written information being exchanged in the meetings? For example, if everyone is discussing last quarter's sales, is there a chart or table on the screen that everyone is referencing showing the numbers in question? If the meeting is taking place without slides, are there printed materials you are referencing? If there are visuals that you know will be discussed in the meeting, could you mark them up on a tablet or with a highlighter on paper so you're, again, primed to discuss the points you predict will come up before they actually are being said? Being able to reinforce what you are hearing with what you are seeing or reading can really help with your retention of (invisible) discussion around (visible) information, because, again, you don't need to expend the energy mentally to deal with the information solely orally if you have a visual to support you. If you're making the visuals, make them visually support your conversation around them. For example, maybe it's possible to more fluently answer your colleagues' questions about a dip in sales (or indeed guide them to that dip in sales) if you have marked the corresponding sales dip on the chart you are sharing by highlighting the dip in a different color.
- I made sure the classroom was designed to be free of distracting noise, light and interruption.
What else is happening in your space, on your devices, or on your screen during these meetings? If you're in a well-lit conference room, have a large-enough and clear-enough screen, a comfortable chair and all the notes and details you need at hand, that's a much simpler environment for the brain to absorb information in than on a laptop on a small table in a noisy café or at home with your phone pinging with other notifications and the neighbor's washing machine rattling your walls.
- I planned a lot of "silent" time into lessons so learners had mental space to process what I was teaching before and after they needed to use it in a productive capacity.
It may not be possible to change the content of the meetings or how much time is spent there, but it may be possible to give yourself more preparation and reflection time before and after the meetings to do whatever you need to do to help you be more "on" in the "productive" time of the meeting itself. Maybe this is a reminder that pops up on your phone a few days before the meeting to confirm over email with Co-Presenter X that Account Y or Colleague Z will be discussed; maybe it's keeping an "emergent needs" to-do list by your side in the meeting to have a place to deposit unaddressed ideas from conversations that can't be dealt with in the moment. Maybe it's just taking a short walk after the meeting instead of going back right away to other work, delaying whatever emergent work has come from the meeting until you've had time for your mind to settle.
- I briefly refreshed learners' knowledge from previous lessons before launching into new material.
Do your meetings contain any "tidying up" of the previous meeting's action items? If they don't, perhaps this could be a practice you do for yourself the day before the meeting in service of reducing the need to think on the spot. I found learners appreciated a bit of fun here, too, to help everyone relax a bit after being outside of our English-only classroom for a whole week; is there a culture in your office of the first people in the meeting chatting while they wait for others to arrive, or to go downstairs to the coffee shop in the lobby fifteen minutes beforehand with a colleague also going to the meeting to catch up on their week? Doing something like this with someone who'll be there as well could help your brain act as if it is in a safer, more familiar space.
Good luck!
posted by mdonley at 2:20 PM on February 17 [19 favorites]
I would go beyond automatic captioning to hooking in something that can do voice input and quick translation. It won’t always be accurate, but it will lift the cognitive load significantly.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:37 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 2:37 PM on February 17 [1 favorite]
Are you in a position to take 5 minute breaks every 15 minutes? The only way I can hyper focus on other languages is by taking frequent breaks.
Or as often as you can get away with. Suggest taking a 5 minute coffee reprieve after 30 mins? Key is do NOT chitchat in French during these 5 mins, do not catch up on email, take a complete 5 min words processing break. Use the bathroom if you have to.
As a young professional (23) I got away with at least occasionally stepping away from meetings in Spanish by making sure my transaction leader knew what I was doing and why. Most of the people in the room were native speakers and they can appreciate someone struggling in their language, if they’ve ever had to struggle in English even if they were quite good.
Even once every 1-2 hrs helps a lot.
posted by cacao at 4:55 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]
Or as often as you can get away with. Suggest taking a 5 minute coffee reprieve after 30 mins? Key is do NOT chitchat in French during these 5 mins, do not catch up on email, take a complete 5 min words processing break. Use the bathroom if you have to.
As a young professional (23) I got away with at least occasionally stepping away from meetings in Spanish by making sure my transaction leader knew what I was doing and why. Most of the people in the room were native speakers and they can appreciate someone struggling in their language, if they’ve ever had to struggle in English even if they were quite good.
Even once every 1-2 hrs helps a lot.
posted by cacao at 4:55 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]
For me, creating a visual picture of what is being said helps me maintain attention, and when listening in a second language, doing purposeful translation in my head (even picturing the words in English) is what works.
posted by EarnestDeer at 2:59 AM on February 18
posted by EarnestDeer at 2:59 AM on February 18
Repeat what they are saying in your own head. This has allowed me to stay focused on very dry audio books for hours and hours at a time.
posted by CharlesDeP at 7:16 AM on February 18
posted by CharlesDeP at 7:16 AM on February 18
How much do you have to cover your difficulty with French? That is, can you explicitly foreground it and ask other meeting participants to make it easy for you? What I’m thinking is that you can break in at intervals and ask for a quick recap (or quickly recap your understanding of the last few minutes) to make sure you haven’t missed anything due to your imperfect French? (I wouldn’t couch it as lack of focus.)
This only works if it’s the kind of situation where you can admit imperfection and people are willing to cater to you, but if it is, I think that could work.
posted by LizardBreath at 4:32 PM on February 18
This only works if it’s the kind of situation where you can admit imperfection and people are willing to cater to you, but if it is, I think that could work.
posted by LizardBreath at 4:32 PM on February 18
Response by poster: After years of study, I have finally got to the point where I can mostly keep up with French at the same time as I switched to a new file dominated by francophone team members.
I need to actually spend some time immersed in the work related French conversations to improve my ear. If I ask for accommodation or explanation, 90% of my francophone co-workers will simply switch to English because they all speak English fluently but that is not helpful to me or fair to them.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:48 PM on February 18 [3 favorites]
I need to actually spend some time immersed in the work related French conversations to improve my ear. If I ask for accommodation or explanation, 90% of my francophone co-workers will simply switch to English because they all speak English fluently but that is not helpful to me or fair to them.
posted by jacquilynne at 4:48 PM on February 18 [3 favorites]
When I was studying abroad in Brazil as an intermediate portuguese student, my host family would watch soap operas. I found that it made a huge difference for me to sit right by the tv speaker so that the audio was as loud as comfortably possible for me.
In this case, for virtual meetings make sure that the audio is loud and clear to you. I never realized until that experience how much we can piece together meaning from fragments of sounds in our first language (like talking in a loud bar), but in another language you don’t have that luxury and have to actually hear as completely as possible to stay locked in.
Hopefully that’s not banal! It made a huge, surprising difference for me.
posted by umbú at 6:55 PM on February 18 [5 favorites]
In this case, for virtual meetings make sure that the audio is loud and clear to you. I never realized until that experience how much we can piece together meaning from fragments of sounds in our first language (like talking in a loud bar), but in another language you don’t have that luxury and have to actually hear as completely as possible to stay locked in.
Hopefully that’s not banal! It made a huge, surprising difference for me.
posted by umbú at 6:55 PM on February 18 [5 favorites]
I work for the GOC in a bilingual environment too and I find that doing something else with my hands (knitting, fidget spinner or puzzles online) really helps me concentrate better on what is being said, plus using the captions function in Teams, which does a surprisingly good job as long as the meeting language is set to French. The former stops my mind from wandering (which it does in English!) missing what is being said in French, and the latter allows me to sort of repeat or reinforce what is being said so I internalize it better. It's hard to force yourself to concentrate as a primary activity.
I also sign up for the French version of training that are offered so I can get better at concentrating on French for longer periods of time in an environment that requires lower or no participation from me. Podcasts with interviews are also helpful because they're similar to meetings. I tend to listen to the ones Radio Canada does when I want to do some French listening.
I've found that watching TV and such isn't as helpful for being able to follow work meetings because they are too formalized and scripted and regimented; meetings are filled with a lot more diverging trains of thought and asides and require a different type of understanding - one that you are probably better suited to with your language level because that's your primary exposure to it and your vocabulary set, if that's any consolation!
posted by urbanlenny at 8:52 AM on February 20 [1 favorite]
I also sign up for the French version of training that are offered so I can get better at concentrating on French for longer periods of time in an environment that requires lower or no participation from me. Podcasts with interviews are also helpful because they're similar to meetings. I tend to listen to the ones Radio Canada does when I want to do some French listening.
I've found that watching TV and such isn't as helpful for being able to follow work meetings because they are too formalized and scripted and regimented; meetings are filled with a lot more diverging trains of thought and asides and require a different type of understanding - one that you are probably better suited to with your language level because that's your primary exposure to it and your vocabulary set, if that's any consolation!
posted by urbanlenny at 8:52 AM on February 20 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: I also sign up for the French version of training that are offered so I can get better at concentrating on French for longer periods of time in an environment that requires lower or no participation from me.
Ohhhh, this is smart! We have a team that regularly presents research and information on areas related to our work broadly but not necessarily to my work specifically, and I could definitely go to the French version of those talks.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:00 AM on February 20
Ohhhh, this is smart! We have a team that regularly presents research and information on areas related to our work broadly but not necessarily to my work specifically, and I could definitely go to the French version of those talks.
posted by jacquilynne at 10:00 AM on February 20
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Of course, you would want to make sure other parties are okay with this approach. In my experience, most people are, especially if you promise to delete any recordings as soon as you know you've captured what you need.
posted by rpfields at 12:45 PM on February 17 [2 favorites]