Dialogue Dilemma:
Difficulties with accents among professors

Amanda Peterka

For the first half of the semester, senior Cassie Cope thought her economics professor kept referring to Asians. Turns out, he was really saying “agents,” but in his thick Portuguese accent, it was difficult to tell.

They come in all different nationalities – the professors you can’t understand because of their pronunciation of the English language. They tend to be mostly in math and science classes, teaching concepts that are difficult enough to pronounce in the first place, regardless of accent.

Grover Hudson, linguistics professor at MSU, said the reason they’re in those classes is simply because Americans aren’t doing so hot in those subjects.

“Our education system just isn’t cranking them [math and science professors] out at the rate they’re needed. We’re instead relying on immigrants in science and math,” Hudson said. “Clearly in the math department here, there’s amazing number of Chinese and Russian professors.”

But it’s not just in those majors that there’s a problem. Drew Stanecki, a junior in accounting, encountered one in his economics class.

“It seemed like he had only been learning the language for a short amount of time,” Stanecki said of his professor of Asian descent. “It didn’t bother me, but rest of class wouldn’t pay attention and would make fun of him during class. It was kind of horrible.”

Stanecki also said that it was difficult to ask questions because the professor wouldn’t understand the questions themselves and would therefore not give an appropriate response.

But who’s to blame for this? Is it the foreign-speaking professor, many times an immigrant from a different country? Or is it the student who doesn’t attempt to even understand what the professor is saying, regardless of nationality?

Hudson, who helped work to develop the standards for MSU’s foreign teaching assistants, says it’s a combination of both.

“There’s no question that it’s more difficult to listen to a nonnative speaker, but a degree of effort isn’t unreasonable to expect in the case where you’re hiring the best people you can get to teach the content,” he said. “I’m not confident that problem is as great as it’s talked about in the student population.”

Stanecki also agreed that there’s a responsibility on the student’s part, even if it means leaning in extra close to catch the professor’s words.

“The professor is here to try and learn to speak English and to teach, and students should learn to work with that and be accepting of that,” Stanecki said. “There are people who know what they’re talking about – it’s just a language barrier.”

However, it’s a known theory that adults have more difficulty learning a foreign language, so it might not be easy for foreign professors to learn English, according to Hudson. Some say it’s because adults lose neural flexibility after the age of fifteen, and other say it’s just because of a lack of constant exposure to a language that makes it difficult to learn.

“In either case, it’s harder for adults,” Hudson said. “They don’t get the kind of graded, sympathetic input children get for their first language. We intuitively understand how to adapt our language to children. When we see an adult, we assume that person speaks English, so input is different.”

For the professors, though, it may be that they know the English language already and it’s just pronunciation that makes it difficult for them to be understood.

“There’s no question that many of these professors are extremely fluent, but their problem is articulation,” Husdon said. “They know the language and have advanced vocabulary, but the problem is in the phonetics.”

Kyle Kemps, a freshman music major, had one such teaching assistant in his math class. The woman, of Indian descent, has difficulty pronouncing the word “probability,” among others, but it’s not bad enough for him to complain.

“She knows her words, but you can’t understand her because of her accent,” he said. But he then said that he doesn’t blame his TA for his performance in the class: “That’s all my doing - I impact my grade in that class.”

David Mellem, a senior in political science and philosophy, said he’s had a couple of foreign professors in his experience here at MSU, one being his freshman-year statistics professor. But he’s also never really blamed the professor.

“In my experience, if you know something about what you are supposed to be learning (by, you know, reading the assigned material) it's not that bad,” Mellem said. “Most professors are willing to slow down and try to pronounce things correctly if students mention any problems.”

And yet, classes are riddled with people who complain about not being able to understand the professor. But it seems that the university has somewhat listened in the past to their complaints.

About fifteen years ago, Hudson said he was involved in talks that led to the establishment of the SPEAK test for foreign teaching assistants. Administered by the English Language Center, the test is basically a speaking prompt in which prospective TAs have to talk about in length about for up to 45 minutes. Tapes of the speech are reviewed by three different raters, and a score of 50 is passing.

If the candidate is right around that mark, he or she can go to an appeals process, which is a face-to-face interview with department heads and the testing director of the ELC. The prospective TA has four chances to take the test for free and can only try once a semester.

The English Language Center, however, doesn’t know of a test for professors. Hudson said he thought there was one especially for professors but couldn’t give an exact answer. Neither could anyone from MSU human resources or faculty and staff development. Two phone transfers also yielded no answers.

Regardless of if there actually is a test or not, Stanecki said that maybe there should be one for foreign professors, but it didn’t have to be that difficult.

“It shouldn’t be for perfection, just a general understanding of the language,” he said. “It should be very simple, if anything at all.”

Hudson said he thought there were some programs in place to help professors with the language barrier.

“The main thing is that the university has some way of assuring itself that when it appoints faculty they have adequate oral English,” he said.

But what do you do if you get a professor you can’t understand? Just complain to your fellow students? Complain to a departmental head? The best thing may be to just work around it and understand that professors are hired for a reason, regardless of their ethnicity.

“Not just students but the population as a whole has to understand that if we’re going to compete in science, math and engineering, and we’re not going to provide enough people, then we have to be happy with the people we’re getting,” Hudson said.

Even if it means having to retrain our ears a bit.