<p>You cannot determine whether a school has a lot of teachers with hard-to-understand accents based on their names. I won’t even take the trouble to hurl the word “xenophobic,” mostly because I think the strategy is, first and foremost, foolish. That doesn’t negate the reasonable concerns of people wondering about whether a teacher’s accent is an impediment to understanding the material in a particular course. Or people who would be wary of a department where many instructors have been deemed hard to understand by a lot of people (not just a handful of potentially disgruntled students).</p>
<p>Research universities try to hire the best scholars/scientists (i.e. the best minds) in the fields, most often regardless of national origins. Some consider this as a strength of the research universities, while other may want to avoid them. They definitely have choices.</p>
<p>I would agree that being around the best minds, at a university or in the workplace, is a positive. And a school that hires the best scholars “regardless of national origins” should be applauded. But one can believe that and also wish to be taught by people who are able to effectively communicate what they know. In my own experience working with many foreign-born professionals I have RARELY found someone’s accent an impediment to understanding him or her. Rarely. Not never.</p>
<p>It’s useless to study with the best minds if they can’t make themselves understood. It seems to me that this is a situation in which people reasonably want both: an accomplished scholar who is also a good (if not excellent) teacher. I agree that you can’t judge this by the names of professors–rather, you have to dig deeper and find out whether the college actually take steps to make sure that teachers can teach effectively.</p>
<p>It may not be true anymore, but NSF is partially to blame. The huge NSF funding a good researcher brings to a university outweighed everything else. Teaching awards used to be a kiss of death to tenure.</p>
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<p>Schools also have choices. </p>
<p>And their final choices are not often based on great concerns for the level of education offered to undergraduates. Keeping their star researchers happy with loads of cheap labor, teaching sinecures, and plenty of time to dedicate to research, and generous sabbaticals is paramount. </p>
<p>The issue is NOT about hiring the best scholars and scientists in their field. Twist it and churn as you like. The issue is about the army of graduate students who show up for their studies and are expected to contribute via teaching duties. It is also about cheaper teachers that are cheaper for a … very good reason. In addition, the students are not the only ones victimized by the “research uber alles” model. TAs and graduate assuistants are exploited. As well as younger lecturers and professors starting out. </p>
<p>The main objective and mission of a university should be to provide the very best teaching available. How this reconciles with the impetus on research varies considerably among universities and colleges. </p>
<p>You have the right to support the practice of concentrating on research versus teaching. And others have the right to denounce the practice as a disgrace. Both of us probably do it our self-interest. I was speaking on behalf of the people who foot the bills and pay their tuition and fees with the expectation of being educated by people with the appropriate credentials. </p>
<p>Obviously, people from “the other side” of the aisle or lectern have different self-interests.</p>
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<p>Yep, that must be it. The battle between the xenophobe versus the TOEFL genius who suffers no fool nor slacker.</p>
<p>I stand corrected.</p>
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<p>I am from the “other side” (faculty) and I agree with you 100%. I am irritated by some colleagues who blame their persistent teaching failures on the stupidity, ignorance, laziness, provinciality etc. etc. of students. I have little patience for it.</p>
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<p>Further proving my point considering the above ignores the fact some Profs I’ve seen accused of having a “heavy accent” in the idiotic student comments actually have native-level proficiency in English because THEY’RE ACTUALLY AMERICAN-BORN. </p>
<p>The Profs’ crime was to be foreign looking, have foreign sounding names, and no-nonsense graders towards those who want to coast through college without being challenged or doing much work. </p>
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<p>Doesn’t necessarily mean your colleagues aren’t correct. I’ve felt the same way about some fellow undergrad classmates/other undergrads I’ve encountered…sometimes to the extent that I wondered how they managed to graduate high school…much less gain admission to college for undergrad…or in some cases…even grad school. </p>
<p>A former roommate who was TAing a grad-level technology course in an Ivy uni’s school of education encountered a 3rd year PhD student who flaked out on the majority of the assigned projects/labs and did abysmally on the midterm and final. That PhD student then had the gall to plead with the Prof to pass him because he needed that course to continue in his program. </p>
<p>Surprisingly…the Prof generously surveyed all the TAs to ask if he should pass him. Not surprisingly…and IMHO…rightly…they all voted to flunk him. </p>
<p>I wouldn’t be surprised if that student decided to try blaming my roommate’s “foreign accent” for his self-inflicted failures considering my roommate is “foreign looking” by being Asian-American…even though he’s born in the states and sounds like someone from a posh NE suburb. Many other students have made such insinuations about other Profs/TAs that would sound ridiculous to anyone who has actually met them in real life.</p>
<p>There have been many studies showing that complaints about a professor or TA accents are positively related with bad grades. I have also heard complaints about one of my TAs being hard to understand because he has a “thick accent.” He does have a German name, but he was born and raised in Iowa and has zero accent :-)</p>
<p>Is it not possible that students get bad grades in classes taught by profs they can’t understand? That would be the obvious result, to me.</p>
<p>Responding to the original question: Because one of my kids would obviously be a STEM major, we did think about being able to understand profs and TAs and that did factor into the college decision process. I asked student tour guides a couple of times if they or their friends had personally experienced being taught by faculty/TAs with difficult to understand accents. I stopped asking because either the tour guides were not STEM majors or their responses were not revealing. A Stanford tour guide said she had never been asked that question before, and then, didn’t answer the question. At the big public S2 considered, he spent an extended overnight with a STEM student, going to classes and labs over two days, and had a pretty good feel for what it would be like.
I think it is easier to understand a non-native language speaker if you have a clue what the word(s) being spoken might be. If a word or term is new to you and you hear it spoken by an ESL speaker, you can be quickly lost. Because students in STEM majors generally experience more new technical language and terms in their lectures/study sessions (IMO) and are more likely to have non-native speakers as profs or TAs, the ability to understand what is being said is a valid concern.</p>
<p>cobrat: The fact that you know case examples of native English speakers who were accused of being hard to understand based on bad student attitude and ‘foreign’ appearance does not negate the experience of those who have had TAs and Profs who actually are unintelligible. It’s not an either/or proposition.</p>
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<p>Maybe an Iowa accent or dialect that is different from that of students from other parts of the US?</p>
<p>[American</a> English Dialects](<a href=“American English Dialects”>American English Dialects)
[American</a> Dialects : Dialect map of American English](<a href=“http://robertspage.com/dialects.html]American”>American Dialects : Dialect map of American English)
[US</a> Regional Accents - Where do you fit in? | Vox Daily](<a href=“http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/2008/03/linguistic_geography_mainland_united_states.html]US”>http://blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/2008/03/linguistic_geography_mainland_united_states.html)</p>
<p>Bay,</p>
<p>what would you say about a student who misses class, doesn’t turn in homework, not once stops by during office hours to ask for help(or phonetic translation of some terms, H wouldn’t mind, even if most of the terms have some internationally recognized Greek letter or some other signs any student needs to be able to recognize when written on the board), and then says he failed the class because he couldn’t understand the professor. At the same time the great majority of the class seems to have absolutely no problem with prof’s accent whatsoever.</p>
<p>I think there are some profs who shouldn’t be teaching, for all sorts of reasons. I just don’t think we should make “the accent” a catch phrase for any number of things students may find problematic.</p>
<p>Maybe it would be valid to substitute “fluency” for “accent”. Native English speakers with stronger regional accents may sound quirky to some ears, but they are certainly fluent. I have had professors and have many friends and acquaintances who are Persian, Indian and Pakistani who are accented but fluent English speakers. I have also had TAs who are accented and not fluent, and accented in ways where the words slur together. Native Indian English speakers tend to almost over enunciate consonants. Many English speakers from African countries have the same pattern. I have found that native Chinese speakers slur and leave off more sounds and have difficulty with many of the sounds that are distinguishing cues in English words. I’m sure any linguists out there could give technical names to these.</p>
<p>I remember when my kids were 4-6 and working on sight words. These were words that they were supposed to know just in a glance like a face without having to “decode” the word letter by letter. There was even research about presenting the sight words on a circular flashcard so they would be recognized like a face rather than read left to right. Listening can be the same way. If a student is studying a subject that is challenging for them (I’m not going to quibble about what that might be) and they have to work just to decode the basic words in the explanation, forget about the actual content, learning is going to be harder. My BIL who was a business major - and a quite successful one out in the workplace - had an intro econ class in Kane Hall at the U of W - a giant lecture hall. The prof decided to take roll and BIL was marked absent several days because he could not recognize his own name as read aloud by this person. He might have know econ inside and out, but was very challenged in communicating the most basic information to students.</p>
<p>Again, the OP was not plotting to avoid going to class or doing work and looking for schools where the presence of accented teachers would be an available excuse. OP wants to have the best chance at succeeding in college and has identified lack of fluency in the TA ranks as a possible stumbling block.</p>
<p>parabella,
I’m not sure I understand your point. If only one student in a course complains about a prof’s accent or coherency, then obviously it is not a universal problem, or a problem at all. It is hard to see how one complaint would cause any issues for a prof. I imagine it is quite common for a few students to dislike a prof’s style, for whatever reason, while at the same time the majority of the class raves about him.</p>
<p>There was nothing about TAs in the original post. 
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<p>Some people may find some accents harder to understand, there is nothing wrong with that. At the same time a thick-accented professor from India may be a better teacher than a native speaker who mumbles or can’t organize his thoughts. How would you know from looking at the last name?</p>
<p>The point is, there is a category of students with some entitlement issues. They rather blame a prof then admit they haven’t studied hard enough.</p>
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<p>"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? "</p>
<p>How about this bit of foreign flavor? Although this is not directly related to the OP’s question or the precise discussion about hard to understand accents, your anecdote exemplifies part of what some of us consider a major problem in our higher education. From the general tone of the post, I think I might speculate that your friend the TA was not a student finishing his (or her) own PhD. </p>
<p>Was your friend an undergraduate or a graduate student? Regardless, this does not change much of my usual position that TAs should have no business grading the work of another student nor a have a voice in passing or flunking peers. The “polling” by the professor only highlights the level of addication of responsibilities that is practiced in schools that rely on that TA model of instruction. Again, a total disgrace!</p>