Foreign Professors who can't speak English - why?

Parents Forum
101

<p>English is the international language of advanced research. Just Monday I was at the University of Minnesota Mathematics Library, and I saw a journal published in Japan that was founded about fifty years ago, with a journal title in Esperanto. All of the articles in the journal were in English--all of the article authors had Japanese names and were affiliated with Japanese universities. There is still a fair amount of original mathematics research first published in French, but most of the German journals consist entirely of articles in English, and generally if you page through scientific journals these days you see much more English that you would have a generation ago. Americans can go abroad to join research teams, and do, because of this language environment worldwide. </p>

<p>This returns to my point earlier in this thread. Lots of native speakers of other languages use English as their language of research collaboration, so lots of use of English in the scientific community includes accents, vocabulary choice, and grammatical patterns beyond the range of conversational usage in America. That's just the way that life is these days. Students in the United States are getting a good education if their undergraduate instruction comes from people who were born all over the world.</p>

102

<p>Teaching undergrads is not universally held in high esteem by graduate students in the sciences. It takes up too much of their time. They prefer research assistantships, which allow them to work with their professors on science related to their interests and future careers.</p>

103

<p>When my husband decided to do his post-doc in Germany the lab director told him the fact that he knew no German didn't matter. There were lots of internationals and lab meetings were in English. Luckily my husband didn't believe him - and squeezed in a semester of German at the local community college - although there were a large number of internationals (from USA, Europe and Japan as I recall) the casual language of the lab was still German. But it was true lab meetings, journal club and all the papers that came out of the lab were written in English.</p>

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<p>I think it's important to note that relatively few American students -- including high-achievement math/science oriented students -- think it's important or valuable to master any foreign language not spoken in their homes, unless it's a ticket-punch on the way to university admission. In the rest of the world, every high-achieving math/science oriented student must acquire a pretty high level mastery of English, and lots of low-achieving students as well.</p>

<p>I'll hazard this guess: Every one of the foreign-born profs and TAs people are complaining about here speak English better than 99% of the American-born students could handle any language other than English not spoken in their homes. And all of them are doubtless working to get better at it, too, something their students could help with if they tried. It just seems so spoiled and petulant to be complaining about this.</p>

105

<p>
[quote]
In the rest of the world, every high-achieving math/science oriented student must acquire a pretty high level mastery of English, and lots of low-achieving students as well.

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</p>

<p>Hear. Hear. I read in former Senator Paul Simon's book The Tongue-Tied American that the United States is the ONLY country in the whole wide world in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. degree without a working knowledge of a second language.</p>

106

<p>Not in math! At Harvard, you have to pass a language exam in two out the following three languages: Russian, German and French before you're allowed to take the Ph.D. Generals. But of course, the level of fluency required is nowhere near the fluency in English required of foreign students and profs.</p>

107

<p>There could be a difference between facility in reading/writing of the foreign language versus speaking it. And it's possible the foreign professor even has English speech with l00% correct syntax and high quality vocabulary, yet the accent is too thick for a thick American to understand. Sometimes it's more a question of diction than anything else. </p>

<p>A recent favorite job for B.A. graduates from the social sciences and humanities who can't find any work to make themselves happy is to take up the offers of foreign-language schools in Asia. There, they have a classroom and are hired without any prior teaching experience or need for knowledge in the host country's language. It is all about increasing the amount of spoken language in the English classrooms, which I've heard are book-based when conducted by a homegrown teacher from the Asian country. (Don't know if this is true, it's just what I've heard.)</p>

<p>So this expresses that there's a market for students to learn to use (not just read and translate on written pages) a spoken English.</p>

<p>And this story may or may not be helpful, depending on your outlook on popular culture, but here goes anyway: ten years ago, I had reason to visit a middle school public "English Foreign Language" classroom in Israel. Their motivations were excellent to learn: job future, opportunity to travel, converse with a friend's visiting grandma from Detroit, etc. </p>

<p>At that time, ten years ago, their main source for hearing spoken English was MTV. Actually the discussion I led was about the role of MTV in American culture, letting them know that Americans don't all ascribe to the values presented, or gather in girl groups to surrround the boy symmetrically in a 6:1 ratio. </p>

<p>So now, with the explosion of media and even YouTube, students growing up have much more opportunity to hear unaccented English. That could improve the situation, although not in time for the OP's daughter certainly.</p>

<p>I agree, Americans are abysmal at learning foreign languages. I recall hearing some language teachers in a previous h.s. with serious budget problems, that they experienced the worst budget cuts as a new h.s. building project was begun. They envisioned language labs with headphones, to keep up with new technologies for teaching language, and resented the science labs for all the shiny new equipment.
In the end, they were left with a classroom, bulletin board, stack of textbooks, "just like the 1950's" as the sad French teacher said.</p>

108

<ol>
<li><p>I was aware of that, and commend Harvard for it. </p></li>
<li><p>However, I don't think the level of fluency required is high, and I don't think it involves actually speaking the language at all. It's reading fluency. At least I think that's the case with most such requirements, where they exist.</p></li>
<li><p>I am uncertain how much of an anachronism this is, though. I don't think a lot of current math scholarship gets published in Russian, German or French anymore. And however much still is, I'm sure it will be a lot less 10 years from now. I'm not in favor of assigning PhD students busywork simply because it is traditional and used to serve some function, and because it might produce some moral benefit. On the other hand, I'm also not in favor of people whining about their teachers' accents in English.</p></li>
</ol>

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<p>paying3, I think the only way to "improve the situation" is to increase the number of Americans going into the sciences, math, engineering, etc -- not to hope for better accent by foreigners who come here to do work we should ourselves be doing...</p>

110

<p>I'm trying to think globally. </p>

<p>Around me and my kids' friends, all I hear about these days is Americans going into sciences, math and engineering. (Where I'm coming from: my 3 are all in the humanities.) At the h.s. parent nights, the teachers in math and science have parent lines going out into the halls wanting to "talk" while the humanities teachers sit with a few appointments. The curriculum of the maths and sciences keeps getting ratcheted up by state education bureaucrats until students drop out of school because of it. Enough, already.</p>

<p>My suggestion (as a humble First Grade teacher who had to sit through teacher training sessions in Math) is that the math educrats know NOTHING about children and how they learn. We changed curricula 5 times in 6 years, for no good reason. No book taught it any better than the previous one. Addison Wesley, McGraw Hill, Chicago Math, Everyday Math, Mimosa...I taught them all and a few I can't recall. It was ridiculous. Nobody seemed to know what to do at that level. If that's what goes up into the middle and high schools, no wonder.</p>

<p>To me, it felt like a bullying: math is so important, civics not so much...no balance.
At least the humanities were taught sensibly. We are not on target at the very youngest levels for math teaching, that I know first-hand for sure.</p>

<p>Maybe I just proved your point, katliamom :)</p>

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<p>paying3, I appreciate your comments about your poor experience with math/science instruction, it's probably part of the reason kids aren't pursuing it later in their education. And let me add, I don't think the problem is necessarily the teachers. Rather, I think it's faddish curricula used not because they're effective but to justify some administrator's position.</p>

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<p>Faintly echoing JHS's sensibilities: So, is this all about the accents, or is it just like America after Sputnik and we don't want to give up our power in the world to foreign governments and peoples? What if, at this moment, people from Asia or India have a better grasp of this subject matter, and until we correct that imbalance, our students are better off with a foreign instructor. (still, you have to be able to understand the speech, I can't get around that one..)</p>

113

<p>It really is a shame that more universities don't require that their new non-native english speaking professors be videotaped and then critiqued for intelligibility on a sample undergraduate lesson. A little bit of accent-reduction support from a qualified speech therapist can work wonders -- particularly with some of the technology that's out there that helps someone visibly see how their pronunciation varies from the ideal. It would probably benefit the professor in many other aspects of university life besides undergraduate teaching.</p>

<p>As someone with a hearing impairment, people with thick accents can be excruciatingly hard to understand, even with amplification. (Same for native english speakers who put their hands in front of their mouths when they speak.)</p>

<p>Unfortunately it is all too common for a freshman to find that the calculus teacher has a thick accent that is hard to decipher, and the TA also has an accent and has long since forgotten how to do delta epsilon proofs.</p>

114

<p>Harness all that technology and come up with a classroom speaker system that clarifies the accent, not just amplifies it. My earlier post...turns out there is something that can do it. A kind of close-captioning system.<br>
One room per hall could have this technology and assign the troubled teacher to that room. It just doesn't sound that hard.
Longer term, I also like the thought of speech pathologists helping out so the speaker improves.</p>

115

<p>
[quote]
It really is a shame that more universities don't require that their new non-native english speaking professors be videotaped and then critiqued for intelligibility on a sample undergraduate lesson.

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<p>I think my alma mater, which has a large number of international graduate students, has been doing something like that for a very long time.</p>

116

<p>I believe all Teaching fellows are required to be videotaped for pedagogical purposes in their first year of teaching at Harvard. I don't know about profs.</p>

117

<p>SIdenote for levity...
Marite's posting that teaching fellows must be videotaped reminded me of a childhood story from our household.</p>

<p>S1, at age 3, had all the usual jealous big sibling feelings when D began to talk and steal attention from him. Someone admired her early talking and said, "Oh my, someone should TAPE her!"
"Good idea," cheered S1, who ran off to get masking tape to put over her mouth (we stopped him, obviously).</p>

<p>So is this yet another solution, TAPE those unintelligible teaching assistants?</p>

<p>carry on...</p>

118

<p>In the most recent graduating class at Amherst (430 students), 18 students received a degree in Mathematics. An additional 8 degrees were conferred in computer sciences. Thus, a total of 26 degrees were granted in Math and Computer Sciences, a number that is quite respectable for a class size of 430. Thus, we do have a good proportion of students who are interested and capable in math, at least at this one college. </p>

<p>However, of the 18 math majors, only 2 students majored solely in math. The rest doubled with another major: 6 in Economics, 2 in Copmuter Sciences, 3 in English, 3 in Physics, 1 in PoilSci, and 1 in History and Economics. Thus, it is likely that only 2 of these 18 math majors will proceed to graduate school to pursue pure math. My unscientific reading of these numbers indicates to me that students in math perceive a need beyond a math degree for a career. One of the kids whom I know doubled in Math and Econ and is now at Harvard Law. </p>

<p>In contrast, only 2 of the CS students doubled in another major (Math), suggesting that these students will proceed into graduate schools or professional career that are related to CS.</p>

<p>The problem in college math teaching is compounded by it service nature. The math department has to teach introductory calculus to almost half the students; many of these have no intrinsic interests in math nor do they think will use it in their career. Thus, much of the course focuses operation proficiency rather than the interesting aspects behind simple calculus.</p>

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<p>I know two young people who are (in one case) or have been recently (in the other; he graduated) math grad students. Neither was a math major in college. The first was a CS major who then did a terminal master's in math at MIT before applying to a PhD program, and the other was a Physics major. So the population of math grad students isn't completely limited to college math majors. On the other hand, my young cousin who just got her degree from Harvard in math is in a graduate program in Computational Linguistics. (In Europe, too. I don't know what language her courses are taught in, assuming she takes some courses as a first-year graduate student.)</p>

<p>
[quote]
The math department has to teach introductory calculus to almost half the students; many of these have no intrinsic interests in math nor do they think will use it in their career. Thus, much of the course focuses operation proficiency rather than the interesting aspects behind simple calculus.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>This statement indicates something is terribly wrong to me. I recognize the "service work" problem. But if students have no intrinsic interest in math and don't plan to use it in their careers, why not emphasize what is intellectually interesting rather than focusing on unwanted and unuseful operational proficiency? </p>

<p>I always did well at math before college, and I use algebra all the time in my work. I took AP Calculus back in the day and did fine, and for the life of me I can't remember a thing about it and have never missed it. I never got any idea there was anything at all intellectually interesting about it; it was just a series of rules someone told me I had to learn, so I did. My daughter, who was the prototypical involuntary calculus student as a first-year college student (after a year of non-AP calculus in high school), very much appreciated the fact that her teacher (a graduate student, naturally) was always going out of his way to engage her intellectually. (Which was a good thing, because she did NOT achieve operational proficiency to any meaningful extent.) Her brother is having the same experience now in the same course. He took AP Calculus BC but didn't exactly ace the AP test, to be delicate about it, and though he placed into Honors Calculus chose to take regular Calculus instead. He is enjoying it a lot, thanks to the much broader perspective his current teacher is bringing to it compared to his (elderly math PhD) high school teacher.</p>

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<p>
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But if students have no intrinsic interest in math and don't plan to use it in their careers, why not emphasize what is intellectually interesting rather than focusing on unwanted and unuseful operational proficiency?

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</p>

<p>Argh... If what is intellectually interesting were to be the criterion for requirements, a lot of students would not find courses in history, literature, foreign cultures, etc.... worth taking. </p>

<p>As citizens, we ought to have more rather than less scientific literacy. And a passing understanding of basic math.</p>