<p>I would advise your daughter to sit in on the other lab sections. This will provide excellent review of the material, and may help her understand her TA’s accent. I had a foreign TA for organic chem lab, and the organic terminology was a new language to me. Combined with the TA’s accent, it was extremely difficult to learn the language of Ochem. I won’t even try to explain what I thought Cinnamic Acid was for a few weeks. If your d. attends the other lab as well as her own, she’ll be hearing the material again (great for learning) and will get the terminology down in English. Once she gets the terminology in English as well as the Chinese accent, her ear may be better able to interpret the accent over time. Win win. Good luck!</p>
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<p>For a price. If you know how much the colleges paying the post docs, you wouldn’t be surprised why many of them are from China and other parts of Asia.</p>
<p>Amen to that, hillbillie. My nephew is a physics post doc at a major private research university. His salary: 45K. Less than the department secretary.</p>
<p>As a faculty supervisor of graduate students, including international students, I suggest that the student share her concern with the department head of the department in which the TA is enrolled as a graduate student. She may wish to bring 2-3 other students with her. One of two scenarios is likely: 1) The TA must have been accepted into the program having met the minimum test score requirement for proficiency in English at this university. All US graduate schools require a test of English language ability and will not admit students who fall below the threshold of the minimum score that each university sets. That test score for this TA is, for some reason, not an accurate gauge of speaking ability. The student may have done unusually well in the testing environment (having studied for the test) or there may have been irregularities in the testing, enabling the student to send a false score to the US. The department head needs to know that the student lacks proficiency in English and the TA needs to be taken out of the classroom for a semester while he/she develops English language speaking skills. Department heads will do this when alerted to the problem. 2) The other scenario is that the TA speaks English well, albeit with a heavy accent. Professors who interact regularly with international students, including this TA, have no problem understanding the TA. This scenario is actually the more likely, in my experience. I teach undergraduates who have never heard anything but a Midwestern accent. They complain that they can’t understand TAs or professors from New York or Great Britain - more distant accents absolutely floor them. The solution in this case is time - if the students in this class accept that it is their job to learn to understand this TA, within two weeks they will understand the TA. The key here is the dept. head: he/she can readily determine whether scenario #1 or #2 is operative and take action or send the students on their way, as is appropriate.</p>
<p>Here’s a point to ponder. Many American colleges and universities try to increase their diversity by attracting foreign/international students. Walk in to the intro physics course on the campus 10 minutes from me, and you will find a plethora of Chinese, Korean, Russian, Indian, and others. Not graduate students, mind you, undergrads. Last spring the freshman general physics course had 560+ students, split between 3 professors. The professors were Greek, Chinese, and Romanian. The 5 TA’s were 4 American and 1 Chinese. The students were from around the globe. Everyone had to deal with accents and language barriers. </p>
<p>aglages, in your ideal university where all the TA’s and professors speak without accents, I guess you only accept American students as well?</p>
<p>I came to a university in a city from a very backward rural area where people spoke more slowly and drawled slightly. At first I hard time understanding my classmates from Long Island, who jabbered really fast with an LI accent. </p>
<p>According to the school website, they require some test of language proficiency TOEFL score before the TA’s get put in classrooms. You have made it sound as if she doesn’t even SPEAK English, which I find unlikely.</p>
<p>" I have difficulty believing that they (the school) couldn’t find someone that can speak English (well) to teach intro A&P. Just my opinion…"</p>
<p>I’m with you…</p>
<p>Not all universities would accept this as tolerable or acceptable, and if this one doesn’t care about educating undergraduates, - leave and go to a quality school that provides a quality education… Thats the only way things will ever change.</p>
<p>Just to be very clear - I think it’s great to have learning opportunity’s across cultures, heritages, histories, and prospectives and we all have lots to learn from each other… But instructors and students needs to be able to communicate or it’s all a very expensive lesson in frustration (at best)…</p>
<p>Still astounded at how many members here are finding excuses for this…</p>
<p>just to be clear – my arguments are REASONS and not EXCUSES. There is a difference.</p>
<p>When I was an undergrad back when the dinos roamed…I had a TA for physics lab who spoke almost no English…and what he did speak was not able to be understood. A group of us went directly to the department chairperson. The profs don’t assign the TAs. We put our concerns in writing…that we were unable to understand the material being presented in the labs. In our situation, it was actually dangerous. Our school added a second (English speaking) TA to the lab section. </p>
<p>I would go straight to the top. State the facts. Explain that you need to understand the material being presented and that you cannot because the instructor is difficult to understand due to lack of famililarity with the language. Be prepared to continue UP the food chain until you get a good reason why this can’t be fixed for you and your classmates.</p>
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<p>The TOEFL is a written test. It doesn’t show anything about a speakers ability to use the language to communicate by speaking. In particular, it does not deal with heavy accents or sound productions that differ in the English language vs the native language. And you can pass the TOEFL with really poor grammar skills in English as well. </p>
<p>This TA could have met proficiency on the TOEFL but might still be very difficult to understand due to grammar and accent issues.</p>
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<p>The sad truth is, hard sciences and engineering are not that attractive to many American kids. Schools need to fill their departments. It has nothing to do with diversity. There are plenty of Asian American kids for that purpose. I am sure colleges always work hard to attract more African American and Hispanic kids. They need the foreign kids and, in many cases, their paying ability. Without them, many many departments would be scaled back or shut down.</p>
<p>uscd<em>ucla</em>dad, I disagree that you can’t tell ahead of time when this will happen. I had a very specific conversation with D1 about the two large universities she had applied to regarding this issue. We discussed that (1) generally you have very little contact personally with full professors until at least your junior year, and (2) some of the TAs you will deal with will have poor English skills and/or be relatively uninterested in teaching (in fact, I found that many professors at the major university I attended also seemed to dislike teaching undergrads). We are a family that DID vote with our pocketbook and pay more for a college where this was less likely to be an issue. I realize that not every family has this option. But I don’t think anyone should be surprised when this happens at a large school. It is part and parcel of the “research university”, and was part of our decision making process.</p>
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Umm, wow. That leaves me pretty speechless.</p>
<p>My son graduated from a large research U in 2002. At the commencement for the College of Sciences, I counted the number of grad students who had undergrad degrees from a US college (It was in the program and I was bored. Total about 30%) Compare the number of undergrad degrees in science and math in this country to the number of undergrads who have to take a class and you have the problem. Solution long term is to have more of our kids major in math and science.<br>
Yeah, like that’s likely.</p>
<p>Whoops, didn’t mean to get into an AA part of this conversation</p>
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<p>Then what is attractive to “many American kids”? As I wrote in page four of the thread, academic areas in business and economics don’t seem to be all that attractive to American kids, either. They may be more attractive relative to the natural and applied sciences, but at 50/50 domestic/international, my school is contributing to the “problem” of TAs and professors with “bad” English.</p>
<p>Edit</p>
<p>Some of the countries my international classmates hail from include the following:</p>
<p>China
Singapore
India
Russia
Bulgaria
Romania
Turkey
Spain
Brazil
Peru</p>
<p>I’ve only met two international students who natively speak English. One is Canadian, the other British. All of my classmates from the above listed countries speak English with an accent that’s pretty typical, in my opinion, of their national origin. I have no problems understanding any of them, but like I said, my school is clearly a part of the “problem” instead of the “solution.”</p>
<p>From my understanding of this, the TA is not teaching intro A&P – there is a lecture component with a professor. The TA is in charge of the lab component. The lab is suppose to reinforce what is learned in the lecture portion. It provides hands-on “experience”. Is the TA giving a lecture in the lab? Or is she just giving directions on the dissection process? Is there not a lab manual or directions on how to complete the lab or is it all verbal directions from the TA? I am trying to understand how this lab is being run because I don’t see what the issue is unless the TA is teaching “new” material not covered by the professor.</p>
<p>There are professors with “language” issues – do you think the university would get rid of them if there are complaints?? This will not be the last encounter with language issues especially if you stay in the science/math arena.</p>
<p>“academic areas in business and economics don’t seem to be all that attractive to American kids, either”</p>
<p>– True. That’s because it’s more lucrative to get an MBA and work in a corporate setting at a highly inflated executive salary than to research/teach a purely theoretical field which will likely leave you a mere academic. The result is… subjects like advanced statistics being taught by, you guessed it, foreign TAs :)</p>
<p>^</p>
<p>I forgot about the attractiveness of the MBA to many people. (That’s what happens when you read Mas-Colell.)</p>
<p>Frankly, I’ve experienced a similar level of frustration as an undergrad. Briefly, this one very good reason as to why my son is attending a small school.</p>
<p>My son had two of these kinds of lab. In one, the student was from an asian country (not the usual ones) and had a tough accent to understand. My son has traveled around the world and has spent 8 years in chinese classes. I just suggested that he listen more carefully and that mostly worked out. The other students had the same problem. He wound up doing fine in that lab.</p>
<p>In the other case, the TA was totally incompetent. It was about 10 weeks into the course and he hadn’t graded and returned any lab reports. He was also pretty poor about administering the labs. I suggest that my son talk to the lab director. He had a one-on-one and the lab director spoke to the TA. The TA would grade the lab reports and get them back to the students and final grades would be bumped up one letter grade. That’s the best that they could do at that time.</p>
<p>It’s a problem but I didn’t really mind my son going through it. It is part of life in the real world - I have certainly had to talk to people around the world for my job.</p>