<p>(I'm not talking about prof's who teach ESL and I hope I dont sound terrible.)</p>
<p>I'm concerned about professors for whom English is a second language. I have been thinking about my college experience (as I try to help S & D with theres) and one of the truly bad experiences was trying to learn electrical engineering from Dr. Chung. Brilliant perhaps but I could not understand him at all.</p>
<p>As I glance around the science and engineering departments web sites, I see more and more faculty profiles from all over the world. No problem with that Ive spent many years living overseas but am concerned with how well the difficult concepts come across to (often) overwhelmed students from someone who speaks with a particularly strong accent.</p>
<p>My son has been around folks with accents all his life. We are not anti-immigration, or anti-anyone. He could not understand his Asian calculus professor. I don’t know how much that contributed to his lack of success in the class, but it was certainly a factor. </p>
<p>I think the ability to communicate in the English language should be a factor in the hiring of professors and adjuncts, but that is apparently often not the case. As my third son does his course selection, he is looking at sites like rate my professor, and taking English language skills into consideration.</p>
<p>There is another thread about this but I can’t put my finger on it right now. If I remember the general feeling was that yes, it can be a problem. I will never forget a grad school class that I ultimately dropped because I could not understand the prof most of the time and the misproununciation of important terms was so great I could not figure out what he was talking about.</p>
<p>A friend’s '10 son wants to major in engineering. He likes Texas A&M but they are concerned - they’ve heard that a large percentage of the students have tutors for their engineering classes because they simply can’t understand their teachers.</p>
<p>Completely agree with you, mom2three! Often the prof’s ability to attract research funding is the main factor in hiring. I’ve had a brilliant Japanese-born prof who was impossible to understand, and his horrible lectures contributed to my dislike of a particular area of biochemistry. I checked ratemyprofessors, and, oh my, many years later he is still impossible to understand according to the reviews! I also feel sorry for the kids in lab and quiz sections of these classes who get stuck with heavily-accented TAs.</p>
<p>I remember a really cool thing that my undergrad school (Carnegie Mellon) required of non-American professors was an immigration course they had to take. It taught them about local Pittsburgh slang, how to speak with less of an accent, and a bit about American culture so they wouldn’t have to find out by trial and error. It worked pretty well, since many of my professors were foreign (a given being in engineering), but most of them had a very understandable accent. I think my favorite was an Indian professor who had grown up in Sweden and been in the US since he started graduate school.</p>
<p>I’ve had a few professors like this over the years and found it to be a real struggle - as did everyone else in the class. Some compensated with really good lecture materials and handouts - but others seemed unaware that there was a problem.</p>
<p>DH had the same prob. with his engineering classes 30 years ago!
S1 had the same prob. when he got an Indian teacher for calc. first sem. freshman yr.
S was doing so badly and was so frustrated, he dropped the class.</p>
<p>My brother went to Texas A&M (BSME) in the mid-80’s and had such a hard time with some of his engineering instructors. He isn’t one to complain but I remember it being quite an issue.</p>
<p>I generally find that the longer I listen to the person the easier their accent is to understand. My accent is not very strong and I think that those that can’t understand me (rare occasion but happens) have some kind of a deficit
I know several professors with strong accents. They are generally better prepared to teach and make every effort to be well understood.
If you travel or speak other languages well, this should not be a problem, you should have an understanding. On the other hand, how easy it is to understand a person ffrom a deep south? ;)</p>
<p>I think it’s a huge issue. When I was in college, there was no point in my attending the classes of most of my foreign professors because I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. I’m particularly bad with accents; some of my classmates could pick up some or even much of what they were saying, but I truly understood none of it. On the good news front, fewer than 10% of my professors fell into this category and I was able to learn enough from the textbooks to get good grades. And I have to admit that for someone as accent-impaired as I am it’s not just the foreign professors. When I was in law school I had a prof from southern Georgia and I couldn’t understand a word he said either. Fortunately I had many translators in my class.</p>
<p>And that would be the problem. Many Americans are not well-versed in foreign languages. Just look at the trend of foreign language education in U.S. vs. European K-12 schools.</p>
<p>No, that’s not the problem. Instruction in the US is generally expected to be in English, and in understandable English at that. The problem is that some professors and TAs don’t speak understandable English; that’s the bottom line.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t argue that this is not a problem, but I think it’s more complex. Very oftn American kids assume they’ll have a problem understanding these professors and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.</p>
<p>10 or so years ago the State of N. Dakota Legislature was considering a bill dealing with this issue (I can’t remember the details) when the University of ND asked them to commission a study about the problem. A Linguistics professor from Cornell was hired and he designed a study in which students watched a video-taped lecture. 4 professors “gave” the lecture - 1 white/American, 1 African-American, 1 Hispanic, and 1 Asian. (I think) However, the audio was the same for all 4 - the white, American professor. </p>
<p>After students viewed the lecture, they were asked questions about the professor’s accent, how well they could understand the lecture, etc.</p>
<p>The results were that they found the white professor to be outstanding, easy to understand, etc. They found the others to be less understandable - ESPECIALLY the Asian professor who they claimed they could barely understand.</p>
<p>Remember, what they HEARD was the same for all 4 - it was what they SAW that differed. </p>
<p>As a result, the legislature dropped the proposed legislation.</p>
<p>The reason there are so many foreign-born TAs and professors in math, the sciences and engineering is simple: there aren’t enough Americans with PhDs (or on the way to getting PhDs) in those fields who are willing to teach. Americans talented enough to pursue those fields ususally go into the private sector where the money is better. Or they get MBAs or law degrees and make even more money than that. So American undergrads will have to deal with instructors whose English may not be stellar, even understandable , until a mathematical (and theoretical) education is as valued and as lucrative in our society as is banking, investing, lawyering, ‘dotcoming’ etc.</p>
<p>Or those math PhDs got “sucked” into other areas years ago. We have a friend whose MA was in math, but ended up teaching in the fledging computer department at the uni and although finished his Phd in math, never left the computer department. That doesn’t account for the younger profs, but it is what happened to many of the older profs that theoretically could have stayed in the math department. I don’t buy into the “study” results posted by Inthebiz. There are certain transplants whose accents are particularly difficult, it’s just as common in business as I’m sure it still is in the colleges. The prof I couldn’t understand could have been invisible and I still couldn’t have understood him well enough to finish and pass that class.</p>
<p>I really don’t want to blame the kids here…
I have lived abroad. I speak a second language. I teach kids who come from different countries. I am VERY good at understanding people who speak with different accents - in a group I am often the “interpreter.”</p>
<p>And still, there are some folks, especially (IMO) Asians who learn English late in life, who are VERY difficult to understand, even standing face-to-face, one-on-one in every day conversation using everyday vocabulary. Now move that person to the front of an auditorium, and change the vocabulary to words you have NEVER heard before, and you have a nearly impossible situation. </p>
<p>This is not to say these are bad people, or not intelligent, or don’t know their material. But I do think that there are folks employed by our universities who do not have sufficient communication skills in spoken English to be teaching. But they are. </p>
<p>Should our kids avoid every professor who comes from a different country or culture? Of course not! Even if they have to work a little harder to understand a professor, it is usually worth it. However, there are some who are literally unintelligible, and I don’t blame my, or any other kid, for trying to find another professor if that is the case.</p>
<p>I agree that it’s a problem (but then I guess I’m the one who started the other thread). </p>
<p>As I said, it’s a problem with some of the ESL profs but not all of them. I agree that some of these profs are probably brilliant and they’re willing to be profs (re the USA not producing enough for math/science) but nevertheless if the person is unitelligible they can’t convey the necessary information or take part in reasonable verbal discourse and therefore are next to useless to be leading a class and are therefore virtually absent from class. This causes those in the class to basically have to learn the material themselves without the benefit of an engaged prof or to switch out to get an understandable prof. I think this must be frustrating for the prof as well. </p>
<p>So, I think it’s okay to have the foreign profs with the accents if we must but the colleges should select a subset of those who can ‘reasonably’ speak and aurally understand English. The problem now is that it appears that some colleges don’t actually have this requirement.</p>
<p>Since it seems fairly pervasive the students need to do the best they can to try to get a prof who they can understand. Sometimes feedback from other students or certain websites can give an idea but in the end some students will get stuck with the prof.</p>
