Two interesting stories in the Chronicle. First, another state legislature bill that sought (in its original form) to control how academics teach in the classroom; this time addressing their English language abilities.
Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not “speak English clearly and with good pronunciation,” that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty — and would even get a refund. Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a “nonteaching position,” thus losing that instructor’s classroom labor.
As a differently-accented professor myself, I don’t feel in a position to make substantial comments. The article does seem to cover both sides of the argument fairly. It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans. Equally, however, there’s evidence suggesting that this is in part the result of bad training (many schools don’t offer proper training to incoming T.A.s from different countries), as well as expectations (experiments suggest that students ‘expect’ foreign-appearing lecturers to have worse English, and have difficulty in understanding them even when they are perfectly fluent).
The Chronicle also has a follow-up story (sub-required) on the fallout from its plagiarism investigation of last year. Two plagiarists lost their jobs; one had (unspecified) disciplinary action taken against him by his university, another had no action taken against him, after an internal university investigation, which determined that the evidence supported a charge of plagiarism, but that the issue had arisen during a previous collaborative relationship.
{ 26 comments }
Jonathan 04.07.05 at 7:24 pm
What is Horowitz’s position on the long-standing bias in universities against southern accents?
Andrew 04.07.05 at 7:36 pm
Once I had a student complain about how I say
“greater than naught” rather than “greater than zero.” Students complaining all the time is half the reason I work in industry now.
This bill is completely ludicrous. At almost every workplace in the United States, particularly in engineering and science, there is someone with different accent than the typical yankee one working there. I work at a scientific instruments company in Seattle and there are only two americans in the entire company! Learning to understand different forms of English is apart of the real world training universities teach students.
The last thing American university students need is another opertunity to complain, especially to someone who is forced to listen. They really should be made to understand different accents. They’re going to have a hard time working or even interviewing with Microsoft, Amazon.com, or Intel otherwise.
Dirk 04.07.05 at 7:50 pm
What a brilliant idea! From now on every student heading towards a failing grade simply comlains about the teacher’s accent and is out of the class! Failing ten percent of a class guarantees the end of a teaching career! What a brilliant move to increase the quality of public education.
Somehow I feel that Ms. Grande should have never graduated from anything.
sidereal 04.07.05 at 8:04 pm
If passed, I predict numerous vengeance-firings, where disgruntled or ideologically opposed students band together (in a class of 40 it only takes 4) to force the removal of a professor from a teaching position without legal recourse.
Lindsay Beyerstein 04.07.05 at 8:37 pm
As a philosopher who says “aboot” instead of “abowtt,” I feel I have a right to sue Ms. Grande for infringing on my livelihood. Abootness is my stock in trade, after all.
nick 04.07.05 at 8:42 pm
On the phone from Fargo, N.D., State Rep. Bette Grande’s voice rings with clarity. “Colleges are a business,” she says in a starched Midwestern accent.
Oops. She loses.
Actually, this reminds me of the advert they run sometimes during Meet the Press where a white guy rings up for an apartment, doing various ‘foreign’ and ‘ethnic’ accents and offering names that suggest he’s somewhat other than #ffffff on the hex scale. The apartment has been taken. Then he calls up as white-guy-with-white-name, and it’s available.
nick 04.07.05 at 8:50 pm
Abootness is my stock in trade, after all.
Heck, ND isn’t that far from Soviet Canuckistan. You’d be fine.
And while we’re at it, I know that Fargo is actually set in northern Minnesota, not Fargo itself (which has a much flatter midwestern accent); but if I were in a class taught by someone who said ‘Yaaaaahhhh’ and ‘Noooooooo’ like Frances McDormand, I suspect I’d be giggling too much (or trying so hard to stifle my giggles) to take much in.
nick 04.07.05 at 9:01 pm
Final note from the original piece:
She thinks of all the countries she has visited –Â Israel, Egypt, Honduras. “In every place, what was the main thing they wanted to do?” Ms. Grande asks. “To communicate with the American…”
Er, right. And the motivation to ‘communicate with the American’ wasn’t at all related to her tourist dollars.
troll 04.07.05 at 9:19 pm
[aeiou] You’re all gay communists. Totally ineffectual people of no consequence.
cdm 04.07.05 at 9:54 pm
A true story. The setting: the economics department of a large Midwestern university. The Principles of Economics class had a large number of discussion sections, each led by a different teaching assistant. Teaching assistants were PhD students, many of whom came from Korea or China. A student came to the professor’s office hours, and the discussion went something like this.
Student: I can’t understand the TA in my section. He has a terrible accent.
Professor: OK. Who is your TA?
Student: I don’t remember his name.
Professor (checks list): All right. Is it Mr Kim?
Student: No.
Professor: Is it Mr Lee?
Student: No.
Professor: Is it Mr Yi?
Student: No.
Professor: Is it Mr Lim?
Student: No.
Professor (puzzled): Well, the only other male TA is Mr M_______.
Student: That’s it! That’s him!
Professor: But he’s from New Hampshire…
cm 04.08.05 at 1:19 am
Does this also apply to foreign language teachers? On the other hand, who needs foreign languages when everybody must speak clear English.
dsquared 04.08.05 at 2:18 am
Oh I love that article.
Mr. Hacker says he has taken several classes where the instructor’s accented English was difficult to comprehend. “There were days when I would go home and have to study the material that they had taught, for the simple reason that I couldn’t understand the things that came out of their mouth,”
Forced to go home and study the material! Heavens above what’s the world coming to! Somebody spoon-feed poor little diddums, quick!
Btw, I wouldn’t take “It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans” at face value[1]. Looking at the Borjas paper, we’re talking about a difference of 0.2 points on a 4-point scale with an average of 3.15. The phrase “statistically but not practically significant” definitely comes to mind; this is a good example of the sort of thing Deirdre McCloskey doesn’t like about the AER.
[1](tangentially, I can only think of one economics professor who is a native American, and that’s Jim Craven)
Andrew 04.08.05 at 3:31 am
haha d^2. imagine reading the material before class!
Is .2 out of 4 statistically significant if the sample is “the subset … that provided the relevant data” out of 75% of 309 voluntary questionaires? I’m not sure of the stats, but hey, I’m a computer scientist so what do we know outside the absolutes… But somehow I doubt my Australian English resulted in lower scores for my students.
dsquared 04.08.05 at 3:49 am
It looks like it’s statistically significant; the sample is big and the regression is sensible meat & potatoes stuff although I daresay you could find some genius of the qualitative variables to criticise it.
I’d note that “counterintuitively” ((c) Steven Landsburg), foreign-born students had a nil effect; the effect is entirely American student/non-American teacher. So apparently Asian TAs and students speak a special pidgin English which they can understand between themselves perfectly but which is incomprehensible to natives. Or possibly, there is a little bit (ie a statistically but not practically significant amount) of racism in Harvard, whereby students refuse to learn from brown people put in a position of authority over them.
Brett Bellmore 04.08.05 at 5:52 am
Old problem; I took Pascal back in ’79, and the class time was virtually useless, the teacher’s Indian accent was so inpeneratable. It took two weeks of class before we could reliably understand what he was saying!
This might seem a small matter to some, but to the proverbial starving student, it’s incredibly offensive to pay good money for instruction that might as well be in a foreign language. Sure, we were able to learn from the textbooks, but we were paying for the class time, too, and for all practical purposes we weren’t getting it.
The bill may be an over-reaction, but the problem is quite real.
Matt McGrattan 04.08.05 at 7:52 am
“I’d note that “counterintuitively†((c) Steven Landsburg), foreign-born students had a nil effect; the effect is entirely American student/non-American teacher. So apparently Asian TAs and students speak a special pidgin English which they can understand between themselves perfectly but which is incomprehensible to natives…Or possibly, there is a little bit (ie a statistically but not practically significant amount) of racism in Harvard”
This might not be racism. Americans, and this is not meant to be a slur, just generally aren’t very good with accents of English other than their own. The British, no doubt in part because accents play such an important role as class-markers, seem, in my experience, to be much more attuned to accents.
You’d have to compare US students being taught by non-Americans from a variety of backgrounds to make the claim that there’s something racist going on… e.g. students being taught by Brits with strong regional accents or by eastern europeans or whatever.
abb1 04.08.05 at 8:04 am
Yeah, I’m with Brett. Just last year the organization I work for paid for a bunch of us to take a computer class. The instructor was shipped from Bangalore specifically for this occasion. We could understand him fine (and he didn’t have much to say anyway), but he couldn’t understand our questions, unless it was a simple one-clause sentence. We had to cancel the class after a couple of days.
The law as described sounds bad, but the problem probably is real.
Tom Doyle 04.08.05 at 8:20 am
“I wouldn’t take “It notes research suggesting that students in sections taught by foreign born T.A.s do worse than students in sections taught by native Americans†at face value”.
Such blatant bias against native Americans is shocking and unconscionable.
tim 04.08.05 at 8:30 am
Though I find Grande’s attitude towards language incredibly chauvinistic and short-sighted, I’m curious if such an initiative would have ever been contemplated in other parts of the United States where there is either a higher degree of geographic mobility or a greater range of spoken English dialects.
As someone who observes the US from up north and pronounces “cot” and “caught” the same (I’d better not apply to NDSU when I finish my PhD!), I can’t help but wonder if Grande’s proposal would have gone anywhere in, say, New York or California.
Is this a genuinely “made in Fargo” proposal?
jet 04.08.05 at 8:52 am
I’m with Brett and Abb1 on this one. That law sounds like total crap, just ripe for abuse, but the problem is very real. And let me say, I had several professors that pissed me off to no end that I was paying money for their instruction. They may have understood computer science nicely, but ask a question in a complex sentence and you’d get a blank blook. Try to understand the odd accent COUPLED with the strange placement of verbs and nouns, and then add in the complex material, and you get pissed off students receiving sub-standard instruction.
But accents are the wrong thing to attack as professors with a poor understanding of English language structure are probably the root problem. People bitching about accents should be slapped silly and forced to sit through a review of their complaints by the most cynical bastards to teach at that University.
Matt McGrattan 04.08.05 at 11:59 am
It’s not often I agree with Jet but yeah, surely the issue is with competency in English.
Someone teaching, or studying, at a university in an English speaking country ought to have excellent spoken and written English.
Accents are largely irrelevant and unless someone has a genuine speech impediment the problem is more with the listener than the speaker.
nick 04.08.05 at 3:22 pm
This might not be racism. Americans, and this is not meant to be a slur, just generally aren’t very good with accents of English other than their own.
This is quite true. My wife and I now have an ongoing ‘guess the non-American accent’ contest, which is an attempt to ensure that she doesn’t accidentally call a South African an Australian, or someone from Ireland Welsh. She’s getting much better at it, though she also has trouble with some of the mountain-country accents in WNC.
(To my amusement, when the Discovery Times channel rebroadcast a Channel 4 series on the Hajj, featuring pilgrims from around the world, the only one given subtitles was from my home town, and had an accent much like my own.)
Brian Ogilvie 04.08.05 at 4:22 pm
A friend of mine, a philosopher from Beijing, failed his second-year review at a prestigious liberal arts college in New England. (Note: it is not in the town where I teach!) He landed on his feet, and now teaches at a prestigious liberal arts college in the Midwest. Though there were various reasons he failed, all of which reflect very poorly on the college, one of them was doubtless his accented English. His powers of comprehension and expression are better than those of most native speakers, but apparently some students could not get past the fact that he had an accent. (And one of his colleagues, from a different department, could not get beyond the fact – scandalous, to her – that he assigned Kant in a course on philosophy of religion.)
The real kicker? The reappointment committee allegedly told him (this is third-hand rumor, he is too upright to pass this on himself) that he did very well with bright students but not so well with mediocre ones, and this was a reason not to renew him. In his second year, four years before the tenure decision! the mind boggles….
Buzz 04.08.05 at 10:22 pm
Here’s where the racism (or at least xenophobia) is to be found: Why restrict the law to a concern with poor spoken English? It’s not as if speaking English clearly is the only necessary skill to be a good teacher. If legislators really wanted to guarantee students a good education, they would make all kinds of bad teaching a part of the bill.
DeadHorseBeater 04.09.05 at 1:34 am
Of the many reasons why university level instruction (by TAs or profs) often sucks, strong accent/bad grammar would be about #4 out of 5 on my list.
I was always able to get used to a TA or prof’s accent in about 3 sections. (It also takes me the first Act of any Shakespearean play to get into the groove, so it’s not a racism/xenophobia thing, just a brain-thing.)
Generally apathetic or disorganized teaching, OTOH, one never gets used to.
There’s no need for a law on this.
JR 04.10.05 at 9:54 pm
I took calculus in a class of several hundred students (meaning no interaction at all with the professor, ever). The TA was a Chinese graduate student whose English was uncertain, to be polite. It was impossible to get him even to understand a question, much less to provide a helpful response. When students are paying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a university education, it really is not asking too much to expect that TA’s can actually talk to their students. But universities treat TA positions as grad student financial aid, not as teaching positions. The reason there is a proposed law on this is universities and their faculties generally have contempt for their students – as is evident from many of the above posts.
Comments on this entry are closed.