Issue date: 3/6/08 Section: The Weekly

About once every other year a student walks into Steve Carr's office complaining. They say their teaching assistant can't speak English.

And about once every other year, Carr, McCormick's associate dean of undergraduate engineering, brings the TA in for a chat, during which he usually finds himself wondering "what's the problem?"

"I sympathize with students who are in a course (and are having trouble understanding their TA)," Carr says. "But if they meet the standards of the Grad School, I'm sure they can do the job."

It's a common refrain among students that they simply cannot understand their instructors. Sometimes they talk about professors, more often teaching assistants. No one denies there are occasional serious problems. "I'm sure we let the students down sometimes," Carr says. But administrators and English as a second language instructors say that often times, students might need to do nothing more than tough it out and learn how to deal with an accent.



Ravi Shah was one of these students. It was the first day of Introduction to Electrical Engineering and the professor was ladling the material in a thick Chinese accent. "I had no idea what the hell he was talking about," says Shah.

In interviews for this article, accents were the single most commonly reported source of miscommunication between instructors and undergraduates. Both the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) test the severity of an international student's accent. But because pronunciation is only a single criteria within one of four grading categories, a test taker's accent is by no means a dominant factor in deciding exam scores.

There's a reason for this: Education experts agree that a lot more goes into teaching than an instructor's inflection.

"Some TAs may have a heavy accent but they might have very good communicative strategies," says Xiaoming Xi, a research scientist for Educational Testing Services. "It takes years to reduce somebody's accent. It takes a lot of work. They've already passed that critical age where you can learn another language without much effort."

Continued...

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