Comments on: Faced with federal suit, Arizona quits monitoring teachers’ English fluency

By: October 3 roundup

October 3 roundup — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:15:20 +0000

[…] never the focus” of teacher fluency monitoring suspended at feds’ insistence [NYTNS, earlier] Reactions to my piece last week include columnist “Johnson” at The Economist (taking […]

By: D

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 23:57:24 +0000

I read not too long ago about a cognitive experiment in which (to summarize) various passages of text were rendered from visually clear to visually obscure. (Note, that is obscure context, not content.) Both retention and comprehension increased as the text became harder to read. I can testify that the same works for obscure content if the reader/listener is willing to put forth the effort.
But my math professor took it to an extreme when wrote a 13 stroke chinese character and claimed that it was a standard math symbol.

By: Justice Department Promotes Bad English in the Schools

Justice Department Promotes Bad English in the Schools — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 11:35:12 +0000

[…] federal civil-rights lawsuit,” notes the Arizona Republic. As legal commentator Walter Olson notes, this is nutty, but it has the apparent support of the nation’s largest teacher’s […]

By: AZFlyer

AZFlyer — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:25:49 +0000

Isn’t this just a lack of education? Although spanish was my first language, I was able to learn to speak standard english without an accent. We’re not talking about someone with a disability that needs legal protections. These are people who (if they are teachers) should be able to learn to pronounce words and use grammar properly. That is, after all, what is expected of their students.

There’s nothing that irks me more than when someone who has a job which requires communicating with the public, cannot speak english well enough to be understood by the average person. Doesn’t matter if it’s teaching or phone tech support. It matters little how well you know your subject if you cannot communicate effectively.

By: david

david — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:32:10 +0000

In 1977 I was walking through a mall in Dallas. A woman approached me and said something. I could not understand a single word. I asked her to repeat what she said, it took about 5 efforts for us to communicate. I thought this strange as I was a resident at the time and working in a charity hospital. What the woman was saying was that she wanted me to consider Dallas public schools for my kids. She identified herself as an English teacher. She was not foreign.

Then we have the current situation in which I was teaching at the medical school. I was one of the more popular teachers, not because I am that great, only because I was the only one that anyone could understand.

By: gasman

gasman — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 20:32:05 +0000

That Jim Finkel seems to attribute at least in part his success in the class to the teacher speaking in a manner only he could interpret makes a fine argument for vetting teacher’s ability to communicate in standard english.

Standard english for north america should be easily enough identified as that spoken by the anchors on network evening news. They are selected by the networks to be clear and non-abrasive to the largest possible segment of television viewing america. That ought to be close enough to the median. That said, I have no explanation for Barbara Walters’ decades of television time.

By: Jim Finkel

Jim Finkel — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 17:15:23 +0000

I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon and learned how to understand the majority of the accents of the TA’s for math and physics and engineering. Even the British accent was a bit tough (he used the pronunciations of “cause” and “caught”) for COS and COT. For the single let us teach engineers some business class, the teacher was Israeli. This was fine for me as I had spent 6 months listening to Israelis mangle English grammar. He used normal Hebrew grammar (with no present tense of ‘to be’), which confused the heck out out of the class. I enjoyed one the highest averages in that class.

By: GregS

GregS — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:43:20 +0000

As long as the teacher can make himself understood, I don’t think his accent or pronunciation should matter. The only exception would be for English language teachers, where correct command of the language is, or should be, a prerequisite for the job. But for math or history or art teachers it shouldn’t be relevant.

By: Alan Gunn

Alan Gunn — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:18:40 +0000

I was once involved in a case in which a professor was denied tenure because his students couldn’t understand his accent and he refused to take classes or tutoring to try to improve it. Seemed sensible enough to me. It’s not just foreign accents, though. My seventh grade teacher (in Louisiana), a native speaker of English, taught us to pronounce “exraordinary” as “extree-ordinary.” (We also learned that science wasn’t interesting enough to bother with and that “Nigras” were OK “in their place.”)

By: Richard Nieporent

Richard Nieporent — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 14:53:33 +0000

The comment by Josh Hanson is pure sophistry. It is not a question of having a regional accent, but the ability of the students to understand what the teacher is saying. How can the students learn the correct way to speak and write English if the teacher is not fluent in English? You cannot teach what you do not know.

I remember back when I was in college and graduate school a big issue in the sciences was the teaching of courses by professors who were not native English speakers. I never realized we were being racists by complaining about not being able to understand what the professor was saying (and in those days you could not get the notes on the Internet).