Communication Journal 1- Chapter 3

As I am international student from Germany, my first language is obviously German. And although I
learned English at school for 8 years, I still do not feel very comfortable in it. So, I noticed that when I
have dinner with my team, I am most of the time very shy, meanwhile I am not shy when I talk to my
German Teammates. This is probably a cause of the self-fulfilling prophecy, which means that when
an individual expects something to occur, the expectation increases the likelihood that it will because
the expectation influences behavior. In this case, as soon as I start talking to someone the first
question I get asked is, where I am from. Not because of how I look or how I act, it is because of how
I talk. Obviously, my English is not perfect at all and I do probably have a strong accent, but every
time I get asked this question I feel more and more uncomfortable about my English. The people
asking me this question are probably in good faith, they are just interested. But I keep thinking about
it a lot. And it could make me try harder to improve my English and talk more, but it does the
complete opposite, it makes me talk less. Because I am uncomfortable in the language. Because the
people do not expect me to have a perfect English. And that is the self-fulfilling prophecy. The people
do not expect me to talk English perfectly, what increases the likelihood that my English is not getting
better, because the expectation influences my behavior. And the fact that my English is not getting
better makes me more and more uncomfortable which cause that I am just talking less.

Furthermore, this shows, that we can have different personalities, depending on which language we
are talking. While I am shy when I talk English, I am very communicative when talking German. And
you can notice this effect even at bilingual speakers. Even though they speak two languages
perfectly, their personality may differ, depending on the language they are speaking in. And this is
something that really fascinates me about communication.