Why Your English Is Better Than You Think — And Why the Gap Is Costing You

At the end of my last article on how to sound more confident in English meetings, I made a promise. I said I was going to explore something that connects directly to everything we have been discussing in this series: why your English is almost certainly better than you think, and why the gap between your actual ability and how you perceive that ability is costing you professionally.

Today I want to make good on that promise.

Because in thousands of hours of coaching professionals from all over the world, the pattern I see most consistently is not people whose English is too weak for the situations they are in. It is people whose perception of their own English is far more negative than the reality, and whose behaviour, as a result, is shaped by a false picture of themselves.

That false picture has real consequences. It keeps people silent in meetings where they have something valuable to say. It makes people over-prepare, over-apologise, and over-qualify their contributions. It stops people applying for jobs they are qualified for, speaking up in rooms where they belong, and charging what they are actually worth.

This article is about where that false picture comes from, why it is almost certainly inaccurate in your case, and what to do about it.

The Reverse Dunning-Kruger Effect in Language Learning

You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect; the well-documented cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their competence. The unskilled, in other words, do not know enough to know what they do not know. But the Dunning-Kruger effect has a lesser-known mirror image, one that is, in my experience, far more common among the professionals I work with.

Research in second language learning has confirmed what the original Dunning-Kruger studies established more broadly: skilled performers, people who actually know a great deal, tend systematically to underestimate their abilities. A study investigating the Dunning-Kruger effect specifically in second language speech learning found that while low performers overestimated their accuracy, high performers showed the opposite pattern: they underestimated their performance relative to external assessments.

Read that again: the better your English, the more likely you are to think it is worse than it actually is.

This happens for a specific reason. As your English develops, your ability to detect what you are doing wrong develops faster than your ability to recognise what you are doing right. You become exquisitely aware of every hesitation, every grammatical slip, every moment you could not find the word you wanted. What you do not notice, what is genuinely invisible to you, is the vast amount of English you are producing fluently, accurately, and effectively. The mistakes are salient. The successes are silent.

Language Imposter Syndrome

There is a related phenomenon that researchers have begun calling language imposter syndrome, and it is worth naming directly, because if you are reading this article, you may well be experiencing it.

Imposter syndrome, first described by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in 1978, refers to the internal experience of believing you are not as competent as others perceive you to be; of feeling like a fraud despite objective evidence of your ability. It was originally observed in high-achieving women, but subsequent research has found it is widespread across genders, cultures, and domains.

In the context of language learning, research published in Frontiers in Psychology found that the impostor phenomenon in second language learners is associated with lower willingness to communicate and that this effect is mediated specifically by perceived competence rather than actual competence. In other words: it is not how good your English actually is that determines whether you speak up. It is how good you believe your English to be.

A separate study investigating the impostor phenomenon in English language learners found that impostors systematically underestimate their language abilities in comparison to external criteria; teacher evaluations, test scores, objective assessments. They consistently rate themselves lower than the evidence warrants.

This is language imposter syndrome: the experience of being genuinely capable, while being genuinely convinced that you are not.

The Native Speaker Standard — A Benchmark You Should Abandon

One of the most significant contributors to inaccurate self-assessment in English learners is a comparison that is both ubiquitous and deeply unfair: the comparison to native speakers.

Most of my students, when they assess their own English, do so against an imagined native speaker standard. They hear an accent, a hesitation, a non-standard construction and they mark it against a version of English they imagine a native speaker would produce. The gap between that imagined standard and their own speech becomes, in their minds, the measure of how far they have to go.

This is a benchmark I would encourage you to abandon entirely, for two reasons.

First, it is unrealistic. Linguistics research is unambiguous on the point that English as a global lingua franca; the English used in most international professional settings; is not the English of a native speaker. It is a negotiated, diverse, internationally intelligible form of communication that no single native speaker variety owns. Research on English as a Lingua Franca has increasingly argued that achieving international intelligibility should be prioritised over achieving native-like pronunciation, and that the emphasis on nativeness is, in the words of the research, “outdated and counterproductive.”

Second, it is counterproductive as a self-assessment tool. Research on non-native accented speech has found that most speakers of English as a second language are highly intelligible; in one study, transcription accuracy for non-native speakers ranged between 79% and 95%. More strikingly, a 2023 study found that exposure to non-native accented speech reduces listening effort and improves social judgments of the speaker over time; suggesting that the social penalties many non-native speakers fear are significantly smaller than they assume.

You are not being assessed against a native speaker standard by the people who matter. You are being assessed on whether you can communicate effectively. And if you are working as a professional in English, the probability is high that you already can.

Three Reasons Your Self-Assessment Is Probably Wrong

1. You are comparing your insides to everyone else’s outsides.

When you listen to yourself speak English, you hear everything: the searching for words, the internal panic, the grammatical structure you are monitoring, the anxiety underneath it all. When you listen to a colleague speak English confidently, you hear the output only; the finished product, not the process behind it.

The result is a comparison that is structurally unfair. Your experience of speaking English, from the inside, will always feel more effortful and uncertain than anyone else’s experience looks from the outside. This does not mean your English is worse. It means you have more information about your own performance than you do about anyone else’s.

2. You remember mistakes far more vividly than successes.

This is a well-established feature of human cognition; what psychologists call negativity bias. We are wired to attend to and remember threats, errors, and failures more readily than positive experiences. In a language context, this means the meeting where you could not find a word stays with you for days. The conversations where you communicated complex ideas fluently and your colleagues understood and responded; those feel unremarkable in the moment and fade quickly.

Your mental archive of your English performance is almost certainly skewed toward the negative. The successes are under-represented, because they did not trigger the same emotional response as the failures.

3. Your standard is moving faster than your awareness of your progress.

This is perhaps the most important point. As your English develops, your standard of what “good English” means rises simultaneously. The things that used to feel like achievements now feel ordinary. The level you once aspired to now feels like the floor, not the ceiling.

The result is that even as your English genuinely improves, your sense of how good it is may not improve at the same rate, because the goalposts have moved. You are a better speaker than you were two years ago. But you may feel exactly as uncertain, because the things that made you uncertain two years ago are now easy, and a new set of harder things has taken their place.

This is not a sign that you are not making progress. It is a sign that you are. The difficulty has followed you upward.

What the Evidence Actually Says About You

If you are a professional working in English as a second language, if you have built a career in a language that is not your first, here is what the evidence says about you specifically.

You have already demonstrated something that the vast majority of people in the world have not: you can function, contribute, and succeed in a professional environment in a second language. The cognitive effort that took, sustained over years, is genuinely remarkable; even if it now feels ordinary because you have been doing it for so long.

Research consistently shows that the gap between self-assessed and externally assessed language ability is largest not among beginners, but among advanced speakers. The more capable you are, the more sharply you see your imperfections, and the less credit you tend to give yourself for everything you are doing right.

The professionals I work with who feel most uncertain about their English are rarely the ones who need the most help. They are often the most capable people in the room — whose self-awareness has outpaced their self-compassion.

Two Things You Can Do This Week

First: collect external evidence, not internal evidence.

For one week, notice how people actually respond to your English; not how you feel about it while you are speaking. Do people ask you to repeat yourself? Do they seem confused? Or do they engage, respond, build on what you said, and ask follow-up questions?

In most cases, the external evidence will tell a very different story from the internal experience. Your colleagues are not having the same conversation about your English that you are having inside your head.

Second: compare yourself to your past self, not to an imagined standard.

Think about where your English was two years ago. Three years ago. What could you not say then that you can say easily now? What situations were terrifying then that are simply part of your week now? What is the evidence of genuine progress, not against a native speaker standard, but against the version of you that existed before?

That comparison, backward in time, against your own history, is the only fair one. And in most cases, the evidence it reveals is far more positive than the story you have been telling yourself.

References

Clance, P.R., & Imes, S.A. (1978). The impostor phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention. “Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice”, 15(3), 241–247. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006

Gallego-Díaz, M., & Sánchez-Mármol, D.J. (2020). The impostor phenomenon in learning of English as a second language. “Revista de Psicología y Educación”, 20(2), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.23923/rpye2020.02.272

Jenkins, J. (2007). “English as a lingua franca: Attitude and identity”. Oxford University Press.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognising one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology”, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121

Levis, J. (2020). Revisiting the intelligibility and nativeness principles. “Journal of Second Language Pronunciation”, 6(3), 310–328. https://doi.org/10.1075/jslp.20036.lev

Munro, M.J., & Derwing, T.M. (1995). Foreign accent, comprehensibility, and intelligibility in the speech of second language learners. “Language Learning”, 45(1), 73–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1995.tb00963.x

Pannhausen, E., Brauer, K., & Proyer, R.T. (2022). Impostor phenomenon and L2 willingness to communicate: Testing communication anxiety and perceived L2 competence as mediators. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1060091. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1060091

Rovetti, J., Sumantry, D., & Russo, F.A. (2023). Exposure to nonnative-accented speech reduces listening effort and improves social judgments of the speaker. Scientific Reports, 13, 2879. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-29082-1

Saito, K., Trofimovich, P., Isaacs, T., & Webb, S. (2020). Dunning-Kruger effect in second language speech learning: How does self perception align with other perception over time? System, 100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2020.102526

Tannen, D. (1994). Talking from 9 to 5: Women and men in the workplace: Language, sex, and power. Avon Books.