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I'm not a native English speaker. Half of the team I manage are native English speakers,the rest are not. The recent project they did on communication templates was checked by the French colleague,while I no longer forward some of the files to English native speakers because they can't form sentences thst are clear enough to understand by others. It is not easy for a lot of people.

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I work with a team that spans native speaker to barely able to form English sentences, and communicating clearly in a mixed audience like that is really a completely separate skill from native language use.

For the ones with minimal English it's often clearer to use phrasing that a native speaker would say is obviously wrong, but matches their native language patterns. Or use simpler but not-quite-appropriate words.

And for the native speakers, the awareness (or self-regulation) to eliminate idioms and less common vocabulary is nigh-impossible for some people.

I find that awareness and avoidance of idioms is much easier once one has learned (well) a second language. I am fluent in Esperanto, and somewhat subconsciously translate much of what I write as I am writing it. It leads me to choose simpler words and grammatical constructs, and to avoid circumlocutions and especially idioms.

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