Oo yah, accents are a problem
by Marcella
Sometimes I have a hard time settling on my place within an issue. For instance, today I read an article in the NY Times about teachers in Arizona who speak with heavy accents. Apparently, the state used to send in “monitors” to listen to the teacher’s enunciation, then “grade” these teachers on whether or not their accents got in the way of student understanding.
The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. That was the case even when the local school officials had already assessed the teachers as fluent in English.
That practice was done away with when a concerned citizen filed a class-action complaint with the Federal Department of Education against the state in 2010, for discriminating against these teachers. The Justice Department got involved, and the state changed its policies in August. At first I was outraged that people would be discriminated like this, then I thought about it a little more. I’m still stuck on my feelings. My sense of humanity tells me it’s wrong to put someone’s career in jeopardy because of his or her accent. My mom has a really thick accent, I have friends with various accents, and I work with a lot of amazingly brilliant and eloquent students who fall into this category as well. So being told your accent is too thick is kind of like being told you’re ”too fat” to do a job. However, there are jobs where weight and ability does matter. Call me an ass, but it’s true. I wouldn’t sign up for a personal trainer who was 300 pounds of pure flab. So I see where Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the State Department of Education, is coming from when he says, of the monitoring,
It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for. ..It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.
To sidestep my humanity for a moment and draw upon personal experience (which is also of humanity, technically speaking, since I’m human) my mom has a heavy accent, and her mispronunciation of words during my childhood led to my own problems with the word, sometimes in my misunderstanding of what she was talking about, and sometimes in my inability to clearly communicate an idea to someone else. This really sucked, so I can see the importance of learning language from someone who speaks it clearly. But as any of the ESL students I work with can tell you, none of us who speak English as a native language speak it clearly either!
The thing is, I’ve since figured out how to say most of those words correctly. My mom still struggles, and always will. Yet she is as smart as they come, and she figures out a way to get her point across to her clients. S0 the problem then, is not in that words are mispronounced–because my mom is still an effective counselor–but in the way those without accents chose to think of language. Dialects vary from region to region, sometimes even within a region (living on Northside Chicago and going to Southside Chicago often illustrated this for me), but the meaning of words remains the same. In the end, isn’t that part of what an education is all about learning that things are different, and yet the same, al around us? We are an increasingly multilingual, multicultural world community. Whether it’s one accent or another, today’s students are going to have to learn how to communicate with other accented tongues as our working class tomorrow.
