<p>There is a difference between having an accent and not knowing how to pronounce a language. </p>
<p>That said, a friend attended Indiana University for his Ph.D. Part of the program required him to teach. The first semester two IU undergrads complained to the department chair that he was difficult to understand given his foreign accent. My friend was born and raised in Boston!</p>
<p>Thirty-two years ago, this was a problem at colleges. Just saying.
This is a practical part of the movement to make English the official language (it would apply to public universities).
Complain to the college ombudsman. The more of you who either sign a note or go in person, the better.</p>
<p>I think it is difficult for some people to adapt to foreign accents, and notice it much more now that I have moved from CA to IN. Many of my coworkers will say they hav a difficult time understanding someone, whereas my brain is better trained to her English spoken with an accent. </p>
<p>That said, TomofBoston, even with all my years listening to Car Talk on NPR, I still have a hard time with a Boston accent. It is like needles on a chalkboard to my brain. (Which is not an insult to the great people of Boston).</p>
<p>Why do they hire them? Because there are not enough US born/speaking people interested in the positions! It’s that simple. Same reason why high schools have difficulties hiring good math and science teachers - there aren’t enough of them to go around.</p>
<p>My husband is always saying he prefers to hire a native-English speaking person but that’s not easy to find!</p>
<p>I am going to say yes. I had an non native speaking teacher in college and it was so hard to get through the material. The woman was kind and knew her stuff but to be honest it was a very hard class to sit through. Repeating material often because we didn’t understand what she was saying. It was small class, but it would have been impossible to understand the information had it been in a lecture hall.</p>
<p>I don’t want to say that this is never a legitimate problem, but I think it’s a legitimate problem in a small minority of the cases in which it’s raised.</p>
<p>Scholars who are not colloquially fluent with accent-free English are usually hired because they know more, do better work, and have more to offer students than someone who is easier to understand. Yes, it takes work to understand them. Boo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Students should deal with it. And that includes those of you who claim not to have an “ear” for accents.</p>
<p>I believe the instances of teachers who are truly incompetent in English being placed in classrooms are few and far between. Every educational institution I know of has English skills standards for TAs. Meanwhile, in much of the developed world, students at the university level may well encounter few if any professors who even try to teach in the students’ native languages. It is only because many of us are lucky enough to have grown up in the world’s imperial power that we feel entitled never to have to face difficulties understanding someone’s language.</p>
<p>I’ll close with an oft-repeated quote from an erstwhile math TA at an Ivy: “It turns out that the only thing I enjoy about teaching is watching the inexorable progression from the first day, when the students are all thrilled that their TA is a native English speaker, to the day four or five weeks later when they finally realize they would have been better off with a TA who spoke only Chinese but who gave a **** about them.”</p>
<p>I had a math TA who could not make himself understood because he mumbled and couldn’t speak up. You couldn’t tell if he had an accent or not. This was in my first semester as a freshman, and I didn’t have enough gumption at the time to complain or to switch out. Everybody in the class frantically wrote down everything he wrote on the board in the hopes of figuring it out.
If you get a teacher you can’t understand, do something about it. Either switch out of the class, or insist that he speak clearly.</p>
<p>It works both ways. In grad school, I had one horrible professor who spoke in complete jibberish. A bunch of the American students were sitting together talking about how much we hated his class. </p>
<p>A Chinese student was at the next table and was really relieved to hear us talking. He said “You mean you don’t understand him either?!!” That Chinese student thought his problems understanding the professor arose because he (as a student) didn’t understand English well enough.</p>
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<p>Entitled? Here I was thinking it was a good thing for citizens of a country to be able to understand one another. </p>
<p>If your job is to impart important information to English-speaking Americans (which they have paid for), one wouldn’t think it is too much to ask that they be able to understand what you are saying.</p>
<p>I think this is one situation in which you are, in fact, “entitled” to be able to understand someone’s language (within reason). If I order a book from Amazon that’s supposed to be in English, and the copy they send me is in Basque, I think I’m “entitled” to complain.</p>
<p>It’s probably hard to draw the line though, as to where a person’s speech is too hard to understand.</p>