<p>Anyone who has studied mathematics, engineering, computer science, or economics at an American university in the past decade has probably had an instructor whose accented English made lectures a challenge to comprehend. Who is to blame when such communication breakdowns occur? Are universities not doing enough to initiate foreign teaching assistants into the ways of the American classroom? Or are American students simply too lazy to tackle the added challenge of deciphering English that is different from theirs?</p>
<p>Probably both. Universities do not hire TAs for teaching abiity and give them little training. if you are in the situation of having to understand them, try to get some sort of training in that (I had it naturally, from growing up in a culture where many people spoke in heavy accents, and from hanging around with others who spoke that way).</p>
<p>It's not just TAs who are foreign, it's profs. It leads one to wonder why the US has to import so many foreign math and science college profs. It's easier to say get rid of TAs and profs who are unintelligible. It's harder to find TAS and profs who will replace them. The article Tenisgh posted about the consequences of the FL law mandating class size reduction shows how hard it is to find enough teaching personnel.</p>
<p>On a lighter note, I have a friend who once told me that he found David Attenborough's BBC-English so hard to follow that he tuned out the wonderful series Attenborough produced and narrated on PBS. Now, that's a reeeal foreign accent...</p>
<p>We went to an open house for a Tier 3? (I assume) engineering program. We were given a tour of their lab facilities and talked to 4 professors and their graduate students. My H and I were amazed that we were able to talk to 4 actual professors. (something that we didn't see at the other schools we toured)</p>
<p>My S was a little put off that 3 professors had accents. His Dad told him to get used to it in engineering. He asked him if he had any problems understanding any of the professors, he replied that he had no trouble understanding anyone. My H and I were glad that in a indirect way they confronted the issue, something that the other universities ignored.</p>
<p>Marite--that's what I was going to say. S said his math prof (not TA) had a heavy dutch accent. He never said he couldn't understand him, though. I doubt it was a problem-- he has been exposed to all kinds of accents growing up in the Bay Area. His piano teacher that he had until high school graduation, for example, is Chinese with a definite accent. I understand that there may be extreme cases of teachers not having adequate English skills, but I would hate to see anyone punished just for having a foreign accent. I also don't like the idea of the government telling a college who can or cannot teach.</p>
<p>The worst time I had in deciphering accents -- the year we moved from the midwest to deep south Louisiana in HS, and the year I spent abroad in north England. After those experiences, asian/european foreign accents in math and science were a cakewalk.</p>
<p>And then there are many different American accents, some of them, depending on where you hail from, easier to understand than others. I personally have been stumped by American English as spoken in the Appalachians.</p>
<p>They couldn't understand me with my New York accent at UChic. ;)</p>
<p>The first day I was at Oxford, in 1971, I went into the college "buttery" (what the heck is that?), ordered a pint of "bitters" (?), and sat down in front of the "tellie", where many of the students were snacking on Franco-American spaghetti on toast. They were screaming hilariously, as a man repeatedly beat a stuffed parrot on a countertop. I didn't understand a word of it.</p>
<p>I remember when Geraldine Ferraro was campaigning for VP and worried that her NY accent and NY-style rapid fire delivery would be incomprehensible to non New Yorkers.
And now, we bring you Spamalot on Broadway. </p>
<p>Ldreochi:
Yeah, I remember wondering to a BBC- English speaking Brit as we were crossing the ferry about the strange language some women sitting a few seat away were speaking. He grinned and said they were from Lancashire, but no, he could not follow what they were saying, either.</p>
<p>Oh Lord, Dr.X! Dr. X was a wonderful MD-PhD, (the man is dead and gone now) who taught a 3 week section of 2nd year med school (Musculoskeletal System, the MDs will know which class I mean). He had a terrible accent, and was proud of it. Years of teaching good ole boys, and a tremendous innate sense of humor, made him use his accent to the fullest - he knew we couldn't understand him. I remember sitting in lab, looking through scopes with 30 other classmates - he was talking about "Look at the perry-fairy of the slide", you could hear the reactions around the room " 'Perry-fairy' what's a perry-fairy? Is it a disease, is it in your joint, quick, look it up?!". Then, finally someone would figure it out, and another wave of frantic whispers would spread across the room - "Periphery", "He means periphery!", and everyone would relax until the next word came up. He loved it! He was a great teacher, too.</p>
<p>I still laugh at one of my experiences. I was a co-op student and working on a study that required some things to be calculated. I worked for quite some time on what should have been a simple problem before I realized that the math I knew just did not have the tools to do the job. So I went into the company's library and "discovered" Differential Equations, which was able to solve the problem easily. And, coincidentally, DiffEq was one of the courses I had the next quarter in school. So I was sooo looking forward to the course when I next got to school.</p>
<p>I walked into class and the TA said, "Welcome to diernalequeens." It went downhill from there.</p>
<p>Cangel: I can relate. One of my beloved chemistry profs was from somehwere deep in the beart of Florida, with the loooooongest drawl I ever heard. Easy to take notes from, delivered 75% of the material of any other professor in the same amount of time (Waaaal, you take sommme of this cheeemical and you put it in the beeeeeaker. Then you take Haaaalf as much of the other cheeeeemical and adddd it.).</p>
<p>Another professor, however, made up for it. He was a stammerer with a highly sibilant "s", Spoke like a machine gun; had to write pretty fast.</p>
<p>So it's not only foreign accents, and the problem of understanding profs isn't new either.</p>
<p>Not all folks from the south speak slowly either. My freshman roommate was from a high mucky-muck family in Greensboro (he is now a judge in North Carolina.) He told me on the first day that his mother's greatest fear was that he'd be rooming with a New York Jew. (I should add, by the way, that we got along great, I think.)</p>
<p>Anyway, his mother came up for parents' weekend. Our room was all decorated in dayglow-and-Hendrix, and she sat on the day-bed, and tried to make conversation. She was originally from northern Alabama and I from various New York Jewish places. So she asked:</p>
<p>"Ditchugocethetauk?" I think she spat this out in milliseconds.</p>
<p>"Excuse me," I asked, enunciating slowly, with words that wouldn't betray Brooklyneese.</p>
<p>"Ditchugocethetauk?" she repeated.</p>
<p>I stared. Thankfully, roommate came in and rescued the both of us.</p>
<p>It was, "Did you go to see the talk?" (the lecture they had for families.)</p>
<p>I imagine she talked about her son's New York Jewish roommate to the day she died, and I still remember her. Fondly, I might add.</p>
<p>One of the best profs I had at MIT was Gian Carlo-Rota who had an Italian accent that wouldn't quit and smoked cigars (preferably smuggled Cubans, for which he gave extra credit). Another good prof was Salvador Luria, also Italian and heavily accented. I did once switch sections because I couldn't understand the TA, but it wasn't the accent (which was okay)---it was because she whispered!</p>
<p>As for regional accents, when I moved to WA from Boston, many many people told me I talked so fast that they couldn't understand me! (I have no accent or "east coast TV news accent" depending on your point of view.)</p>
<p>When I first saw the title of this post, I thought it was going to be about TA's that spoke little or no English. My son had a Chemistry lab TA that spoke/understood very little English. I believe she was only there to supervise/babysit the lab. This would pose a bit of a problem when you had a question concerning mixing two chemicals or something as simple as asking, "Where is the stapler?" The students were able to help each other out; silly me, I thought that would have been the TA's job.</p>
<p>I had "Il Professore Honore Dottore Ar-naaaaal-doe Mo-mi(g)lrl-ee--aaaa-no". He had published 542 research articles in 7 different languages about absolutely nothing in particular, and his classes were exactly like that. (UChicago)</p>
<p>There was a physics prof at UCLA who lectured with an impenetrable accent, covering the blackboard from one side to the other with equations. When he reached the end of the board, he would turn around and, before erasing and starting all over, would say, "Everybody understand now. Yes? No? Maybe?" One day, on cue, the entire class shouted "No!" </p>