<p>Both of my Ds now have had foreign professors with accents so thick they can't understand a word they say. It's not just my Ds, it's almost every student in the class. </p>
<p>One D took a class in the summer at UCSD with a visiting French professor who could barely speak English, took a long time to formulate a sentence and spoke so lowly that it was difficult to even hear her. The class ended up down to 3 or 4 students left attending lectures since almost all students just dropped her class. </p>
<p>Both Ds (UCSD and UCLA) have had Asian professors who were unintelligible due to their heavy accents (as opposed to the Asian professors with accents that were somewhat understandable). </p>
<p>The primary purpose of having a professor teach a class is to convey information. They're in America in that position and due to an inability to speak our language, English, fail miserably at this task. If they can't convey information it's irrelevant how bright they are or how great the accomplishments they've made in their field are.</p>
<p>Why do universities hire these people or allow them to teach on an exchange basis? Is it just so they can do research and are required to teach a class so the uni just lets the students suffer? Is it because it's that terribly difficult to hire a competent professor who is either a native English speaker or at least fluent? Is it because the foreign professors want to spend a semester or two in La Jolla at someone else's expense? Is this something seen mostly at colleges like the UCs or is it rampant throughout the college system? </p>
<p>This has been a very frustrating issue for my Ds. Fortunately it's not all professors but IMO there shouldn't be any that can't adequately convey information due to an inability to speak English at an acceptable level.</p>
<p>DDs have complained about this, especially DD2 in her engineering classes. </p>
<p>I had the same problem with the people who worked in the offices at NYU. Their English was good but the accents were almost impossible. </p>
<p>Back in the day, my math TA spoke 6 or 7 languages before English. Made easy math class hard since he occasionally mixed up even the days of the week. Really relied on the text, but wished they had lecture notes. (Do lecture notes still exist?)</p>
<p>UCI D has had that problem, no complaints yet from the Cal daughter, but is is annoying- how is one suposed to grasp OChem with some one who cannot be understood- perhaps the prof/TA passed the TOEFL, but what about the spoken language?</p>
<p>My son wanted to have and slated to have a class with his engineering mentor, academic advisor, 3 years as extra curricular project supervisor, and one of this year's MacArthur "Genius Award", recipient. But she got pregnant. Why cant teachers be male.</p>
<p>it's just so they can do research and they are required to teach a class. and probably there isn't another professor as eminent in the field who can speak english.</p>
<p>because last time i checked, speaking english was not correlated with academic talent in any field except english.</p>
<p>How frustrating. I hear about this in the maths and sciences particularly, including upstate NY unis </p>
<p>Note to self: invent a technology with close captioning for this problem (wish I knew how)</p>
<p>Wondering if it's a one-way problem, in other words, can they understand your D's when they speak?</p>
<p>Having never experienced this personally, am searching for a bandaid solution. Can someone from that language group publish something to de-bug the accent mistakes, which must be occurring in a pattern. Can the class write a letter to the teacher suggesting s/he write key words on the blackboard as s/he lectures? Even write the key words from the lecture on the board, like a lexicon, and point to them during the lecture (takes less time than writing them out), and probably is using the same highly technical words each time.</p>
<p>also, while i don't have any sort of non anecdotal evidence to back up this claim,</p>
<p>it seems likely that over time and exposure to different accents, you learn how to understand them better. personally, i've never had trouble understanding a professor, even with some professors with what people thought of as heavy accents.</p>
<p>I say this with all seriousness: the problem is as much the students' as the professors'. These days English is a language in international use--all the more so because of the unwillingness of Americans to learn other languages--and hundreds of millions of conversations occur every day in English among interlocutors who didn't grow up in an English-speaking country. Today the "foreigners" get to set the standard of what is understandable English just as much as the Americans do. (And why should Americans set the standard anyway? After all, the language is called "English," not "American," and Britain includes dialects of English that most Americans would have difficulty understanding, spoken by oral tradition of native speakers for generations.) One of the great advantages of a university education at a good university is learning other patterns of English speech besides those of the student's immediate family. </p>
<p>These days, I always roll my eyes :rolleyes: when I see on TV an interview with someone who is speaking English, but the TV news people feel it necessary to add subtitles to the picture to print out what the person is saying. I can understand those interviews in various varieties of world English just fine without the subtitles. Travel more or listen to National Public Radio a lot and your whole family will too. </p>
<p>To the OP's point, those professors are hired because they offer better value as scholars or teachers (or both) than some native speaker of my dialect of General American English to the college. The college hires the best people it can get, and enrolls the best students it can get. The accents of foreigners who live in America a long time tend to become more understandable with more exposure to American English, and the students tend to become better at understanding as they gain exposure to varieties of spoken English and as they learn the formal vocabulary of their fields of study.</p>
<p>^^I just saw it as ironic, and the writer set it up following a long string of achievements so a reader might just imagine a male, but then, whammo, it's a female. Like when people say, If God knew, she would..." to be playful and witty with expectations. </p>
<p>I wasn't offended because I just don't think that poster was doing anything other than eyeball splatting but we couldn't see that. Irony. Wit.</p>
<p>Sorry, that was an offtopic response to an offtopic point.</p>
<p>Am interested in returning to OP's concern...</p>
<p>I interpreted it as illustrating that a woman could have all those accomplishments, and if you have can't take a class with her because of her pregnancy, no one will say anything about it, or would be offended if someone made a comment like his.</p>
<p>but a professor with a heavy accent can have all those accomplishments, etc. but if the accent makes it so he can't teach/harder to teach, people feel entitled to complain as much as they want.</p>
<p>not sure if it's a valid complaint, or if the poster was even trying to make that comparison, but that's how i read it.</p>
<p>Back to topic: If it is truly a problem for most of the class, students should complain to the department chairman. College students are paying for these classes--the TAs/visiting profs should be able to communicate clearly in English.</p>
<p>PhatAlbert,
even if your interpretation is correct, it still implies that being a woman is an impairment of sorts (although one that in that particular case should be forgiven because of her other noble qualities).</p>
<p>If I were counseling my D through such a situation with heavily accented profs, I might ask her if anyone has a somewhat easier time or doesn't mind quite as much. Ask to sit next to the person; put notebooks close beside each other on the desk.</p>
<p>Whenever an incomprehensible word is spoken, D makes a pencil dot on her notebook, and the friend with the flexible ears writes down the tough word.</p>
<p>If prof notices or asks what;s going on, show that you're not passing a note but simply trying to decode his speech. I wonder and imagine, in fact, that the profs know there's a problem and are also frustrated because everyone asks him to repeat constantly, in the marketplace and so on.</p>
<p>Some combination of listening harder, discussing it with the prof or department chair, creative blackboard solutions from the teacher as he lectures, and sharing note-taking might, together, improve things somewhat.</p>