conference - How to ignore a presenter's bad english?

I recently attended an average international conference in Computer Science. This was the first time I actually attended an international conference.

The level of English that I heard during the talks ranged from average to extremely bad (ignoring the native speakers/people that lived a long time in an english speaking country).

I am not a native English speaker, and I do not expect other researchers in the same situation to be as fluent as a native speaker either. But I have worked hard to improve my accent and my elocution to a point where I feel very comfortable speaking the language without stuttering every two words or mispronouncing a lot of things.

As such, I felt extremely frustrated during the entire conference: a speaker with bad English would quickly annoy me, because I felt as if they did not work hard enough on their English elocution, which I believe is an inherent part of being a scientist (especially in Computer Science, where conferences are very common). Therefore, I ended up not being interest in the vast majority of the presentations, even if the subject might have sounded appealing.

How can one improve at looking (or rather, hearing) past the researcher's English, and focusing on their actual contribution?

Answer

You need to get over this feeling, if only because there is nothing you can do about it.

The point of a presentation is to convey information and meaning. It is certainly true that some presenters fail at this, though more often than not these are issues of presentation and structure, rather than language. Indeed, while language issues are sometimes distracting, great pronunciation and use of elaborate grammar are not necessary to convey what you want to say. Most scientific papers are (often purposefully) written in relatively simple language. Most rap songs use grammar that would get at best a D- grade when used in high school. When you talk to friends, you say things like "say it ain't so" or "ain't no sunshine" and other sentences that are grammatically wrong. Yet, in all of these contexts, we communicate what we want to say just fine. In other words, while there clearly is a level of language discomfort beyond which a speaker is unable to convey meaning, this level is actually quite a distance from being a fluent and elaborate speaker of a language.

So, focus on what a speaker wants to convey, using his spoken words and what's on slides and other props, and less on the speaker's level of language.