kpih
04-05-2005, 02:05 PM
Here's an article about foreign TAs and instructors from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Yes. There are TAs and instructors who have a thick accent, and institutions should provide better training. But what the article does not say is the racist subtext in the debate. For instance, more than often international Asian (not AA) and other nonwhite TAs and instructors receive complaints about their accent, while white foreign counterparts do not. Accents, like many other artifacts, reflects the global racial stratifiaction. French accent is sexy, while Chinese accent is FOBbish.
As the article suggests (gutlessly so), accent and language abilities could be a very effective and damaging weapon for students to get back at TAs and instructors. TAs, adjuncts, and untenured faculty are especially vulnerable to this. The current raging anti-immigrant sentiment in the US does not help.
I personally started a letter writing campaign, a public forum, protests, and a chancellor's commission on this issue several years ago at a UC Campus...
It will only get worse...
Teach Impediment
When the student can't understand the instructor, who is to blame?
By JOHN GRAVOIS
On the phone from Fargo, N.D., State Rep. Bette Grande's voice rings with clarity. "Colleges are a business," she says in a starched Midwestern accent. "When we put research as our No. 1 focus, we forgot the student," she says. "We got ourselves all turned around."
Ms. Grande could be talking about any of the ills plaguing a modern university -- drops in per-student spending, tuition increases, or maybe the lack of face time with professors. But she has something much more contentious in mind.
She wants her state's university system to do something about the fact that its students can't understand what the heck their foreign-born instructors are saying.
Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not "speak English clearly and with good pronunciation," that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty -- and would even get a refund.
Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a "nonteaching position," thus losing that instructor's classroom labor.
Almost as soon as the bill went public, Ms. Grande realized she had touched a nerve. Calls and e-mail messages poured in from all over North Dakota and from as far away as Florida and Arizona. In nearly a decade as a legislator, Ms. Grande had never attracted such a prodigious and impassioned response.
That's probably because anyone who has studied mathematics, engineering, computer science, or economics at an American university in the past decade is likely to have harbored the frustrations Ms. Grande's bill aims to soothe. With rising international enrollments in graduate programs, classroom language barriers have become both a public hobbyhorse and a subject for scholarly study in their own right. In more than a dozen states, legislatures have passed laws to set English-language standards for international teaching assistants. But Ms. Grande's bill was designed to send a stronger message: If you can't speak the language clearly, get out of the classroom.
Meanwhile, from the sidelines, linguists are sounding a cautionary note: The natives are restless, sure -- but maybe they should try listening harder.
A Global Academy
Ms. Grande took up her cause last fall, over the course of several visits to North Dakota State University's main campus to campaign for fellow Republicans running in the November elections. There she spoke with former students of hers (when the legislature is not in session, Ms. Grande is a middle- and high-school substitute teacher), friends of her college-age son (a student at North Dakota State), and various kids who had grown up in her neighborhood.
When she asked how their classes were going, she was dismayed to discover how many said they were having trouble wading through a professor's accent. What was worse, the students suggested that the university did not seem interested in doing anything about it.
Ms. Grande sensed a public failing. She approached administrators about the issue, but received responses she found to be tepid at best. "I found it as frustrating as any student had described," she says. "'This is something that the students should work through; it's a diversity issue,' they told me."
"There were more excuses," Ms. Grande sizes up, "than there were avenues to remedy the situation."
At that point she began paving an avenue of her own with the language of a deliberately unforgiving bill. ("If you don't push it to the envelope where they see that it's going to affect them financially," she says, "they're not going to come to the table.")
R. Craig Schnell, North Dakota State's provost, defends the university's policy on foreign teaching assistants, which is built on a series of written and spoken language-proficiency tests and, for those who fail them, remedial classes in English as a second language. "We think we've had pretty good luck with it," he says. He also stresses the importance of exposing students to international influences, especially students from a place like Fargo.
"I think North Dakota's fairly provincial," he says, "and if you sound in any way different, that's a point of contention." Those hang-ups are something students must grow past, he insists. He then cites one of the basic premises -- for Ms. Grande, a basic excuse -- of contemporary higher education: "We're going to live in a global society," Mr. Schnell says, "and we have to be prepared."
Mr. Schnell is probably right about the way the world is heading: There are now many times more nonnative speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers of English, and the gap is likely to widen. But higher education is heading in that direction much faster than are most Midwestern towns.
In 2003 just under 41,000 people earned new Ph.D.'s from American universities, according to the federal "Survey of Earned Doctorates." Of those, about 12,200 -- roughly 30 percent -- were citizens of other countries. In engineering, foreigners have outnumbered U.S. citizens among new Ph.D.'s for the past 20 years. In the physical sciences, meanwhile, 45 percent of the students are foreign. Among all those who earned doctorates from American universities between 1999 and 2003, the most common source of undergraduates was the University of California at Berkeley. But the second most common was Seoul National University, in Korea.
For Nicholas P. Hacker, a 23-year-old resident of Grand Forks who is both a freshman member of the North Dakota Senate and a senior at the University of North Dakota, those trends have hit home with unhappy results.
Mr. Hacker says he has taken several classes where the instructor's accented English was difficult to comprehend. "There were days when I would go home and have to study the material that they had taught, for the simple reason that I couldn't understand the things that came out of their mouth," he says. "It's one thing to go home and study a concept, another not to understand what the professor was saying."
Those experiences are part of what led Mr. Hacker to co-sponsor Ms. Grande's bill. "Sometimes we forget who our real customer is in higher education," he says, "and that's what this bill is -- it's a consumer-protection bill."
Evidence that instruction in accented English affects the learning process is not all anecdotal. George Borjas, an economist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University who studies immigration, says he has found evidence that foreign-born instructors do indeed have a withering effect on undergraduates' academic performance.
In 2000 Mr. Borjas, who is a Cuban immigrant, published a study of students enrolled in a two-term principles-of-economics course at a large, top-ranked public university. By focusing on the students who had one term of a discussion section taught by an American teaching assistant and the other term taught by a foreign-born teaching assistant, he was able to study the effects of exposure to the different types of teachers while controlling for differences among students.
On balance, he found that undergraduates' final grades slid by 0.2 points (on a four-point scale) when they had a foreign-born instructor.
The question is, do such academic breakdowns happen because universities aren't doing enough to prepare international teaching assistants for the classroom, or because American undergraduates, the beleaguered consumers themselves, simply tune out when faced with someone who is sufficiently different from them?
Disorientation
Late in the summer of 2002, Min Liu flew from Shanghai, China, to Fargo to begin a Ph.D. in communication at North Dakota State. Aside from a small battery of language-proficiency tests administered on her second day in the United States, she says she was treated no differently from any other incoming graduate student.
Ten days after stepping onto American soil, she was teaching her first course.
Ms. Liu says she felt woefully unprepared when she first stepped into that classroom. Though she did attend a weeklong departmental orientation for all new teaching assistants, she says there was no effort to socialize her as a foreigner into the mores of American higher education -- much less North Dakotan higher education. "Had I known the problems I was to get myself into," she says, "I wouldn't have come."
Even today, three years after arriving in the United States, Ms. Liu says she still gets two or three complaints per course -- always on anonymous end-of-semester course evaluations and never from a student in person -- saying that she is difficult to understand and does not speak English well enough to teach. But she believes the hang-ups are more cultural than linguistic.
"When I taught as a TA back in China," she says with an intonation that approaches newscaster's English, "I experienced a totally different classroom culture. I had total authority in the classroom. Here, it's almost like the opposite."
While Ms. Liu feels that North Dakota State leaves its international teaching assistants largely to fend for themselves in their new linguistic and cultural landscape, a number of American universities have taken greater pains -- often at the prodding of state legislatures hounded by calls from unhappy parents and students -- to prepare their foreign-born teaching assistants for the classroom.
At the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, foreign-born teaching assistants go through an intensive two-and-a-half-week program that meets for five to six hours a day in the summer. The program encompasses management strategies and teaching methodologies for American classrooms, campus dynamics, and the broader scope of American culture, in addition to focusing on simple language fluency.
Meanwhile, at institutions like Vanderbilt University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, foreign-born teaching assistants are paired with undergraduate tutors whose function is to expose the newcomers to both the rules and idiosyncrasies of students' behavior and speech.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, incoming international teaching assistants participate in role-playing exercises in which they play students and teachers, or in which a student theater group acts out a number of different classroom scenarios for them to discuss.
These programs have their proud advocates, but are they effective? Do undergraduates still complain that they can't make heads or tails of what their foreign instructors are saying?
"Yep," says Diane Larsen-Freeman, director of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, home to one of the most robust international orientation programs. "We do get undergraduates who will complain."
Listen Up
In 1988 Donald L. Rubin, a professor of education and speech communication at the University of Georgia, began toying with an experimental model that would occupy him for the next several years: He gathered American undergraduates inside a classroom and then played a taped lecture for them over high-fidelity speakers. The lecture -- an introduction to the Mahabharata, say, or a discourse on the growing scarcity of helium -- was delivered in the voice of a man from central Ohio.
While the undergraduates sat and listened, they faced an image projected onto the classroom wall in front of them: Half the time, it was a photograph of an American man ("John Smith from Portland"), standing at a chalkboard and staring back at them. For the other half of the testing groups, the slide projected before them was that of an Asian man ("Li Wenshu from Beijing"), standing at the same chalkboard. The two figures were dressed, posed, and groomed as similarly as possible.
Now for the interesting part: When the students were asked to fill in missing words from a printed transcript of the central Ohioan's taped speech, they made 20 percent more errors when staring at the Asian man's image than they did when staring at the picture of "John Smith."
What did that mean?
"Students who expect that nonnative instructors will be poor instructors and unintelligible speakers can listen to what we know to be the most standard English speech and the most well-formed lecture, and yet experience some difficulties in comprehension," Mr. Rubin says. "All the pronunciation improvement in the world," he says, "will not by itself halt the problem of students' dropping classes or complaining about their instructors' language."
At the request of The Chronicle, Mr. Rubin conducted an interview with Ms. Liu to gauge her speaking proficiency. To do so, he used a modified version of the oral examination most widely used in American universities to test foreign-born instructors, the Speak test.
When the test was done, he gave Ms. Liu the maximum score.
"If one actively looks for evidence of native Chinese language interference in Ms. Liu's speech, it is detectable," he writes in an e-mail message describing their conversation. He notes that she does drop an article every now and then ("Although this phenomenon may irritate listeners who are native speakers of English," he writes, "it is unlikely to affect comprehensibility"); she occasionally blends "r" and "l" sounds ("also of minor communicative significance at the rate and degree she exhibits"); and she sometimes produces vowel sounds that are "a little more tense" than would be exhibited by a native speaker of English.
"This marks Ms. Liu as not a native speaker of English," Mr. Rubin writes, "but does not interfere with her intelligibility." Moreover, the vocabulary that she has at her disposal in both speaking and listening, he goes on, is "sophisticated and probably more fluent than my own."
Yet still, every time she teaches, undergraduates complain about her English.
All of this brings Mr. Rubin to an idea that is just beginning to figure fully into the nationwide discussion of communication breakdowns in foreign-born teaching assistants' classrooms: "We must accompany support for international instructors' teaching skills with support for U.S. undergraduates' listening skills," he says, "in particular their ability to listen effectively -- and that means nonprejudicially -- to world Englishes."
Representative Grande's bill, however, rose in the public eye precisely because it was designed to give students the power to oust accented instructors -- a menacing prospect for foreign-born teaching assistants. "It's too harsh," says Syed Rahman, a Bangladeshi graduate teaching assistant in North Dakota State's computer-science department -- one of the most international corners of the university.
For Ms. Liu, the entire issue brings on a certain amount of despair.
'A Convenient Excuse'
International teaching assistants are "set up for failure," Ms. Liu says. "No matter how hard they try, their foreignness will always work against them and provide a convenient excuse for the students who want to resign from a class without taking the responsibility as a student."
After several weeks of discussions with higher-education experts, amendments, and deliberations, Ms. Grande has begun to think differently about the issue of language barriers in the classroom.
Her bill, too, has changed drastically: In both the North Dakota House and the Senate, after several rounds of amendments, it turned into a relatively vague order for the State Board of Higher Education to create a new policy on teaching assistants' communication skills, along with a formalized process for responding to student complaints. By the end of March, that order had been approved by legislators.
"What I'm hoping for is a solution that offers something to our foreign-born teachers," Ms. Grande says, having been convinced that there is much more North Dakota could be doing to prepare international teaching assistants for the classroom.
But she is cool to the thought of culpability on the student's side of the linguistic equation.
"I can understand when they say the students just need to listen harder," she says, acknowledging that that is the "neighborly" thing to do. But she says there are limits to such strained good will. "What if it was bearing on whether or not I was going to be able to grasp materials I was going to need for my profession?" she asks.
When it comes down to it, Ms. Grande still believes that universities are businesses, and students are consumers: If a student cannot understand her professor, then she is being served a faulty product.
Mr. Rubin, however, prefers to think of the issue in terms of prerequisites -- worldly listening skills as a requirement for graduation. "I consider the ability to listen to and comprehend world Englishes a prerequisite to success in a wide variety of enterprises," he says.
At this notion, Ms. Grande balks. She thinks of all the countries she has visited -- Israel, Egypt, Honduras. "In every place, what was the main thing they wanted to do?" Ms. Grande asks. "To communicate with the American. They knew that, throughout their lives, if they wanted advancement they would have to do everything they could to communicate with us."
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i31/31a01001.htm
Section: The Faculty
Volume 51, Issue 31, Page A10
As the article suggests (gutlessly so), accent and language abilities could be a very effective and damaging weapon for students to get back at TAs and instructors. TAs, adjuncts, and untenured faculty are especially vulnerable to this. The current raging anti-immigrant sentiment in the US does not help.
I personally started a letter writing campaign, a public forum, protests, and a chancellor's commission on this issue several years ago at a UC Campus...
It will only get worse...
Teach Impediment
When the student can't understand the instructor, who is to blame?
By JOHN GRAVOIS
On the phone from Fargo, N.D., State Rep. Bette Grande's voice rings with clarity. "Colleges are a business," she says in a starched Midwestern accent. "When we put research as our No. 1 focus, we forgot the student," she says. "We got ourselves all turned around."
Ms. Grande could be talking about any of the ills plaguing a modern university -- drops in per-student spending, tuition increases, or maybe the lack of face time with professors. But she has something much more contentious in mind.
She wants her state's university system to do something about the fact that its students can't understand what the heck their foreign-born instructors are saying.
Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not "speak English clearly and with good pronunciation," that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty -- and would even get a refund.
Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a "nonteaching position," thus losing that instructor's classroom labor.
Almost as soon as the bill went public, Ms. Grande realized she had touched a nerve. Calls and e-mail messages poured in from all over North Dakota and from as far away as Florida and Arizona. In nearly a decade as a legislator, Ms. Grande had never attracted such a prodigious and impassioned response.
That's probably because anyone who has studied mathematics, engineering, computer science, or economics at an American university in the past decade is likely to have harbored the frustrations Ms. Grande's bill aims to soothe. With rising international enrollments in graduate programs, classroom language barriers have become both a public hobbyhorse and a subject for scholarly study in their own right. In more than a dozen states, legislatures have passed laws to set English-language standards for international teaching assistants. But Ms. Grande's bill was designed to send a stronger message: If you can't speak the language clearly, get out of the classroom.
Meanwhile, from the sidelines, linguists are sounding a cautionary note: The natives are restless, sure -- but maybe they should try listening harder.
A Global Academy
Ms. Grande took up her cause last fall, over the course of several visits to North Dakota State University's main campus to campaign for fellow Republicans running in the November elections. There she spoke with former students of hers (when the legislature is not in session, Ms. Grande is a middle- and high-school substitute teacher), friends of her college-age son (a student at North Dakota State), and various kids who had grown up in her neighborhood.
When she asked how their classes were going, she was dismayed to discover how many said they were having trouble wading through a professor's accent. What was worse, the students suggested that the university did not seem interested in doing anything about it.
Ms. Grande sensed a public failing. She approached administrators about the issue, but received responses she found to be tepid at best. "I found it as frustrating as any student had described," she says. "'This is something that the students should work through; it's a diversity issue,' they told me."
"There were more excuses," Ms. Grande sizes up, "than there were avenues to remedy the situation."
At that point she began paving an avenue of her own with the language of a deliberately unforgiving bill. ("If you don't push it to the envelope where they see that it's going to affect them financially," she says, "they're not going to come to the table.")
R. Craig Schnell, North Dakota State's provost, defends the university's policy on foreign teaching assistants, which is built on a series of written and spoken language-proficiency tests and, for those who fail them, remedial classes in English as a second language. "We think we've had pretty good luck with it," he says. He also stresses the importance of exposing students to international influences, especially students from a place like Fargo.
"I think North Dakota's fairly provincial," he says, "and if you sound in any way different, that's a point of contention." Those hang-ups are something students must grow past, he insists. He then cites one of the basic premises -- for Ms. Grande, a basic excuse -- of contemporary higher education: "We're going to live in a global society," Mr. Schnell says, "and we have to be prepared."
Mr. Schnell is probably right about the way the world is heading: There are now many times more nonnative speakers of English in the world than there are native speakers of English, and the gap is likely to widen. But higher education is heading in that direction much faster than are most Midwestern towns.
In 2003 just under 41,000 people earned new Ph.D.'s from American universities, according to the federal "Survey of Earned Doctorates." Of those, about 12,200 -- roughly 30 percent -- were citizens of other countries. In engineering, foreigners have outnumbered U.S. citizens among new Ph.D.'s for the past 20 years. In the physical sciences, meanwhile, 45 percent of the students are foreign. Among all those who earned doctorates from American universities between 1999 and 2003, the most common source of undergraduates was the University of California at Berkeley. But the second most common was Seoul National University, in Korea.
For Nicholas P. Hacker, a 23-year-old resident of Grand Forks who is both a freshman member of the North Dakota Senate and a senior at the University of North Dakota, those trends have hit home with unhappy results.
Mr. Hacker says he has taken several classes where the instructor's accented English was difficult to comprehend. "There were days when I would go home and have to study the material that they had taught, for the simple reason that I couldn't understand the things that came out of their mouth," he says. "It's one thing to go home and study a concept, another not to understand what the professor was saying."
Those experiences are part of what led Mr. Hacker to co-sponsor Ms. Grande's bill. "Sometimes we forget who our real customer is in higher education," he says, "and that's what this bill is -- it's a consumer-protection bill."
Evidence that instruction in accented English affects the learning process is not all anecdotal. George Borjas, an economist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University who studies immigration, says he has found evidence that foreign-born instructors do indeed have a withering effect on undergraduates' academic performance.
In 2000 Mr. Borjas, who is a Cuban immigrant, published a study of students enrolled in a two-term principles-of-economics course at a large, top-ranked public university. By focusing on the students who had one term of a discussion section taught by an American teaching assistant and the other term taught by a foreign-born teaching assistant, he was able to study the effects of exposure to the different types of teachers while controlling for differences among students.
On balance, he found that undergraduates' final grades slid by 0.2 points (on a four-point scale) when they had a foreign-born instructor.
The question is, do such academic breakdowns happen because universities aren't doing enough to prepare international teaching assistants for the classroom, or because American undergraduates, the beleaguered consumers themselves, simply tune out when faced with someone who is sufficiently different from them?
Disorientation
Late in the summer of 2002, Min Liu flew from Shanghai, China, to Fargo to begin a Ph.D. in communication at North Dakota State. Aside from a small battery of language-proficiency tests administered on her second day in the United States, she says she was treated no differently from any other incoming graduate student.
Ten days after stepping onto American soil, she was teaching her first course.
Ms. Liu says she felt woefully unprepared when she first stepped into that classroom. Though she did attend a weeklong departmental orientation for all new teaching assistants, she says there was no effort to socialize her as a foreigner into the mores of American higher education -- much less North Dakotan higher education. "Had I known the problems I was to get myself into," she says, "I wouldn't have come."
Even today, three years after arriving in the United States, Ms. Liu says she still gets two or three complaints per course -- always on anonymous end-of-semester course evaluations and never from a student in person -- saying that she is difficult to understand and does not speak English well enough to teach. But she believes the hang-ups are more cultural than linguistic.
"When I taught as a TA back in China," she says with an intonation that approaches newscaster's English, "I experienced a totally different classroom culture. I had total authority in the classroom. Here, it's almost like the opposite."
While Ms. Liu feels that North Dakota State leaves its international teaching assistants largely to fend for themselves in their new linguistic and cultural landscape, a number of American universities have taken greater pains -- often at the prodding of state legislatures hounded by calls from unhappy parents and students -- to prepare their foreign-born teaching assistants for the classroom.
At the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, foreign-born teaching assistants go through an intensive two-and-a-half-week program that meets for five to six hours a day in the summer. The program encompasses management strategies and teaching methodologies for American classrooms, campus dynamics, and the broader scope of American culture, in addition to focusing on simple language fluency.
Meanwhile, at institutions like Vanderbilt University and the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, foreign-born teaching assistants are paired with undergraduate tutors whose function is to expose the newcomers to both the rules and idiosyncrasies of students' behavior and speech.
At the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, incoming international teaching assistants participate in role-playing exercises in which they play students and teachers, or in which a student theater group acts out a number of different classroom scenarios for them to discuss.
These programs have their proud advocates, but are they effective? Do undergraduates still complain that they can't make heads or tails of what their foreign instructors are saying?
"Yep," says Diane Larsen-Freeman, director of the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan, home to one of the most robust international orientation programs. "We do get undergraduates who will complain."
Listen Up
In 1988 Donald L. Rubin, a professor of education and speech communication at the University of Georgia, began toying with an experimental model that would occupy him for the next several years: He gathered American undergraduates inside a classroom and then played a taped lecture for them over high-fidelity speakers. The lecture -- an introduction to the Mahabharata, say, or a discourse on the growing scarcity of helium -- was delivered in the voice of a man from central Ohio.
While the undergraduates sat and listened, they faced an image projected onto the classroom wall in front of them: Half the time, it was a photograph of an American man ("John Smith from Portland"), standing at a chalkboard and staring back at them. For the other half of the testing groups, the slide projected before them was that of an Asian man ("Li Wenshu from Beijing"), standing at the same chalkboard. The two figures were dressed, posed, and groomed as similarly as possible.
Now for the interesting part: When the students were asked to fill in missing words from a printed transcript of the central Ohioan's taped speech, they made 20 percent more errors when staring at the Asian man's image than they did when staring at the picture of "John Smith."
What did that mean?
"Students who expect that nonnative instructors will be poor instructors and unintelligible speakers can listen to what we know to be the most standard English speech and the most well-formed lecture, and yet experience some difficulties in comprehension," Mr. Rubin says. "All the pronunciation improvement in the world," he says, "will not by itself halt the problem of students' dropping classes or complaining about their instructors' language."
At the request of The Chronicle, Mr. Rubin conducted an interview with Ms. Liu to gauge her speaking proficiency. To do so, he used a modified version of the oral examination most widely used in American universities to test foreign-born instructors, the Speak test.
When the test was done, he gave Ms. Liu the maximum score.
"If one actively looks for evidence of native Chinese language interference in Ms. Liu's speech, it is detectable," he writes in an e-mail message describing their conversation. He notes that she does drop an article every now and then ("Although this phenomenon may irritate listeners who are native speakers of English," he writes, "it is unlikely to affect comprehensibility"); she occasionally blends "r" and "l" sounds ("also of minor communicative significance at the rate and degree she exhibits"); and she sometimes produces vowel sounds that are "a little more tense" than would be exhibited by a native speaker of English.
"This marks Ms. Liu as not a native speaker of English," Mr. Rubin writes, "but does not interfere with her intelligibility." Moreover, the vocabulary that she has at her disposal in both speaking and listening, he goes on, is "sophisticated and probably more fluent than my own."
Yet still, every time she teaches, undergraduates complain about her English.
All of this brings Mr. Rubin to an idea that is just beginning to figure fully into the nationwide discussion of communication breakdowns in foreign-born teaching assistants' classrooms: "We must accompany support for international instructors' teaching skills with support for U.S. undergraduates' listening skills," he says, "in particular their ability to listen effectively -- and that means nonprejudicially -- to world Englishes."
Representative Grande's bill, however, rose in the public eye precisely because it was designed to give students the power to oust accented instructors -- a menacing prospect for foreign-born teaching assistants. "It's too harsh," says Syed Rahman, a Bangladeshi graduate teaching assistant in North Dakota State's computer-science department -- one of the most international corners of the university.
For Ms. Liu, the entire issue brings on a certain amount of despair.
'A Convenient Excuse'
International teaching assistants are "set up for failure," Ms. Liu says. "No matter how hard they try, their foreignness will always work against them and provide a convenient excuse for the students who want to resign from a class without taking the responsibility as a student."
After several weeks of discussions with higher-education experts, amendments, and deliberations, Ms. Grande has begun to think differently about the issue of language barriers in the classroom.
Her bill, too, has changed drastically: In both the North Dakota House and the Senate, after several rounds of amendments, it turned into a relatively vague order for the State Board of Higher Education to create a new policy on teaching assistants' communication skills, along with a formalized process for responding to student complaints. By the end of March, that order had been approved by legislators.
"What I'm hoping for is a solution that offers something to our foreign-born teachers," Ms. Grande says, having been convinced that there is much more North Dakota could be doing to prepare international teaching assistants for the classroom.
But she is cool to the thought of culpability on the student's side of the linguistic equation.
"I can understand when they say the students just need to listen harder," she says, acknowledging that that is the "neighborly" thing to do. But she says there are limits to such strained good will. "What if it was bearing on whether or not I was going to be able to grasp materials I was going to need for my profession?" she asks.
When it comes down to it, Ms. Grande still believes that universities are businesses, and students are consumers: If a student cannot understand her professor, then she is being served a faulty product.
Mr. Rubin, however, prefers to think of the issue in terms of prerequisites -- worldly listening skills as a requirement for graduation. "I consider the ability to listen to and comprehend world Englishes a prerequisite to success in a wide variety of enterprises," he says.
At this notion, Ms. Grande balks. She thinks of all the countries she has visited -- Israel, Egypt, Honduras. "In every place, what was the main thing they wanted to do?" Ms. Grande asks. "To communicate with the American. They knew that, throughout their lives, if they wanted advancement they would have to do everything they could to communicate with us."
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i31/31a01001.htm
Section: The Faculty
Volume 51, Issue 31, Page A10