<p>I think it’s legitimate to know about that. More importantly, it depends on your child’s major.In the humanities courses, there are not so many foreign born teachers. The bigger issue is whether the profs know HOW to teach. I sincerely believe that if we have better teachers who can convey and explain more effectively, we would have more students interested in STEM classes.</p>
<p>mathmom – Here’s the opposite perspective from a parent in the South: I took my child to an open house at a nearby college. A recently-hired administrator made a presentation on scholarships. She spoke with such a heavy Northern accent and so quickly that I could not understand a word she said. Most people in the room eventually tuned out. At least a lot of the foreign-born faculty know they’re hard to understand and speak slowly. :)</p>
<p>^I know that problem. I have the bad habit of talking way too fast. It isn’t just my Hispanic clients telling me to slow down.</p>
<p>If a student goes into a field where lots of the faculty members have accents which are hard to understand, it is also likely that they will work in a field where their coworkers are equally hard to understand. Maybe putting some effort into trying to understand someone with a different accent is not such a bad idea.</p>
<p>I think the issue of accents is injecting a sensitivity into this that confuses the issue. There are people who mumble, or speak too fast, or who face away from the audience, etc. I don’t think any of this is OK, and I don’t agree that students should just grin and bear it. With respect to an accent, I think a student should discuss with others if they are having difficulty before complaining, but if a lot of students can’t understand the teacher, that, to me, is unacceptable.</p>
<p>I think it absolutely can be an issue, particularly if you have any sort of aural processing issue. I knew someone who had to drop a math class in college because he absolutely couldn’t understand his TA’s accent. OP, you can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at a department’s website.</p>
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<p>And how does one know whether someone has a heavy accent from looking at a department’s website? They rarely have voice/lecture samples. </p>
<p>Or are we going to go by looking at who is “foreign looking” on the basis of photographs? Something which can not only be misleading…but also confirm/reinforce underlying biases/prejudices.</p>
<p>I guess if you absolutely can’t understand them, then it is an issue. I doubt this issue comes up that often. </p>
<p>I tend to agree with cobrat. </p>
<p>At my schools, foreign teachers/phd students needed to pass some sort of standardized english speaking exam in order to teach. Consequently, there were plenty of teachers with thick accents but they were all understandable. However, that did not stop students from complaining that they couldn’t understand a word (just a thinly veiled excuse for doing poorly). </p>
<p>Anyways, you can always find out about your teachers beforehand and then transfer to a different section of the course.</p>
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<p>I have only seen graduate students as primary instructors in freshman English composition courses taught in small sections, though I could imagine them being used in beginning foreign language courses that are also taught in small sections.</p>
<p>Other freshman level subjects like chemistry, economics, math were taught by faculty members in large lectures (or small ones for honors courses that only a few students dare to enroll in), with graduate students doing supplemental discussions and labs.</p>
<p>But both faculty members and graduate students can have accents which some students may initially find difficult to understand. However, if you are going to a school with students and instructors from all over the country and world, consider that as exposure to the linguistic diversity of the English speaking world.</p>
<p>In my freshman calc class at Cal a million years ago the prof was French and my TA Greek, both with very thick accents . . . it didn’t help a bit to be trying to decipher 2 different accents when I was working hard enough to decipher the math. My next math class the prof was Korean with a thick accent, but I took a small night section where I could sit in the front row and just stare at him to lip read in addition to listening.</p>
<p>At work, we have people from India, China, Eastern Europe and other places around the world. We also have offices in many other parts of the world and sometimes we have to communicate over the phone. Basically it’s something to get used to if you want to feel comfortable in a lot of jobs where you have a lot of local diversity or if the company does business globally.</p>
<p>I lived overseas as a child, I have two step-parents who are not American, and I speak a number of foreign languages to varying degrees of fluency. But I think there’s a world of difference between communicating with people in the context of a conversation and trying to grasp difficult concepts in a one-way lecture, especially for kids whose auditory skills are not particularly well-developed.</p>
<p>^^^ exactly, Sop14! You said what I was trying to say, but much more cogently - and forget about auditory issues. I had a philosophy class from a prof with a thick Norwegian accent and because of the nature of the material, even though he was tough to understand I wasn’t missing big concepts that the next week’s material required to build from. Also, there were the contextual clues - when he’s going on about Job scraping his boils with pot sherds for the 10th time you know what he meant - you were working from a known text. It’s a little different than trying to learn differential equations or thermodynamics from someone who’s accent is pronounced enough that they are very difficult to understand.</p>
<p>In answer to the OP’s question, the way to find out about the quality of teaching at a school is to poke around online and see what students are saying, and ask students. Note I mention the “quality of teaching”; isn’t that what we’re getting at here? If someone’s manner of speaking is a stumbling block to understanding the material (whether that person mumbles or is a low-talker or has a thick accent of whatever description), that’s a problem. There are other, possibly more important and meaningful things that prevent someone from being a good teacher and I’d just as soon know about those things as well (actually, first).</p>
<p>One of the books about colleges we had actually had a category about percentage of professors with an accent. I’ll poke around and see if we still have that…</p>
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<p>You could just pick up differential equations from the text too - that’s fairly well known.</p>
<p>Back in the 70s we had a real problem with this at the large research university I attended. Some new grad students showed up with very, very poor oral English skills despite seemingly decent scores on the TOEFL. Eventually they found out that there was fairly massive fraud on the part of test-takers from some regions, and they added some kind of pre-term screening that weeded out a number of potential TAs. </p>
<p>But if it just the accent that is tough, that’s a learning process, and one that is reasonably important to master given an increasingly diverse business and professional world.</p>
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<p>I agree with this. Faculty are evaluated on their communication skills, and they should be. Teaching is a communicative and rhetorical art. This is not really about whether a faculty member has a foreign accent; it’s about whether the faculty member can be understood. There are plenty of US-born faculty who have terrible communication and presentation skills.</p>
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By this logic, it would also be beneficial to be taught by some TAs who are uncooperative, sexist, angry, stupid, and lazy, since you will have to deal with people like that in the working world. I guess that’s so, in a way, but it’s not what I want my tuition money to go for.</p>
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<p>At my son’s research university, teachers are hired and kept on based on their research and ability to get grants. Teaching is quite a bit lower on the priority list. It’s pretty easy to see that in job postings. Son had one notorious professor who was quite horrible in teaching (english wasn’t the problem). His RMP comments are pretty funny if you’re not taking his course. He’s had TAs that were pretty bad too but he just went to the department head to complain about that.</p>
<p>The student is ultimately responsible for learning the material, good professor or bad. The student could get some dispensation for a bad professor grade-wise but this might not be that useful if the course is a prerequisite for other courses.</p>