Intparent: But how do you really know unless A) the college doesn’t allow non-native English speaking profs/TAs or has a relatively high level of English speaking capability requirements (speaking - not written) and tests to it orally and enforces it or B) you’ve heard every prof and TA speak? I don’t see how this can be avoided just because the school is smaller unless one of those two apply.</p>
<p>Regarding ‘accents’ - I don’t think accents are the issue - inability to speak reasonably understandable English is the problem. There’s a big difference between the two but I agree some of it’s subjective (i.e. the midewestern kid who can’t understand a New Yawker). As an example, I deal with a fair number of people from India and some I can understand well, most I can understand ok if I try hard enough, but some I simply can’t understand even though they’ve been living in this country for several years.</p>
<p>Regarding international students having to deal with it when they attend college here - well, they knew where they were coming and what to expect. I don’t think most students attending college in the USA are necessarily expecting to encounter a TA/prof they that can’t be reasonably understood by most students. If my kid decided to attend college in Japan that she knew would be taught in Japanese it’d be silly of her to complain she couldn’t understand the native Japanese speaker.</p>
<p>The tradeoff between the large research university and smaller college that does not use/rely on TA’s is one of resources – that smaller college may not even offer many of the courses where the student at the large U. is frustrated because of the lab TA’s accent – and when they do offer the course, they may be limited in terms of the resources that the lab has. That’s not to say that one is better than the other – just that it’s not all that simple of a decision.</p>
<p>This is not an issue that is limited to TAs from other countries. I had problems with understanding teachers 30 years ago, and not at a huge research university, either. I had a calculus professor from England. His command of the English language was excellent, but I still couldn’t understand him with his accent. I had business professors (full professors, not TAs) from India and while I’m sure they were brilliant, I didn’t understand a word they said. And I had a law school professor born and raised in south Georgia who was the hardest to understand of all of them. I used different approaches. I sought out students in the class who DID understand the teacher and got into study groups with them. In one case I went to the professor during office hours and one-on-one, I had better luck understanding him. He was also very aware that he was difficult to understand and willing to work with me. For the law school professor, I taught myself from the book (that often works better than the Socratic method anyway). At some point you have to stop wasting energy trying to transfer out and just work with what you’re stuck with.</p>
<p>My H is from another country. He speaks perfect English. I make more errors speaking English (my native language) than he does. But he speaks with an accent, and not a particularly strong one. I have encountered people from all over the world in professional and non-professional settings, and I can count on one hand the ones I couldn’t understand at all. Occasionally, there was a sentence or expression or if I wasn’t listening carefully, but to say someone is totally incomprehensible has, IMHO, frequently more to do with the listener than the speaker. Communication is a 2-way street. </p>
<p>When H & I are together, he often prefers that I speak/order. He has found, after more than 30 years in this country, that those who are not used to dealing with non-English speakers have the same reaction. As soon as he opens his mouth and they hear an accent, they automatically do not understand, no matter how carefully something is pronounced. </p>
<p>There are, of course, other issues besides language–does the person communicate ideas clearly, are they reading something aloud or speaking extemporaneously, and, of course, the more people interact the better they get at understanding each other.</p>
<p>This is really an important aspect of communication, especially in speech communication. Successful communication requires the receptive attitude both of the listener and the speaker. Communication can be easily stalled if one party does not believe that the other party cannot communicate. During my early years of living in the US, I found that a lot of times my conversation with many English speaking people went very well because they listened and encouraged me to speak. I felt very encouraged when people did not understand me and said “Pardon me…,” or "Could you repeat?” But there was a huge negative effect on me when I started the conversation and some people told me “I don’t understand a thing what you say” and were ready to walk away. I also found that sometimes I could communicate better with students from other countries than with some native English students because foreign students and I were in the same boat: we both had difficulty in speaking and listening, and we were trying to be better speakers and listeners.</p>
<p>In electrical communication, when a receiver cannot decode a signal sent by the transmitter, it can do one the two followings: 1) Declare communication failure. 2) Ask the transmitter to retransmit. This same principle can be applied to human communication with some modification. The speakers can rephrase the questions or the answers. I find that when people don’t understand me the first time, if I rephrase my sentences they will understand. Similarly, when I don’t understand people and if they rephrase what they say I will understand.</p>