Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)

[George Thompson]

> >
> > Arizona has decided that it's unacceptable to have teachers
> > whose spoken English is deemed to be heavily accented or
> ungrammatical, even
> > though the latter has little to do with the former.
>
> Anyone who has gone through an engineering curriculum at a state school
> in the last generation probably has horror stories of trying to
> understand a lecture given by a non-native born grad student whose
> accent was so thick as to make communication impossible.  I know I do.
>

Was there not a court case perhaps 30 years ago, in which a university was sued for using graduate students who were incapable of speaking intelligible English to work off their scholarship & stipend to teach undergraduate courses?
As I recall, the plaintiff's position was that he paid his tuition to take the course because he wanted to learn calculus, or whatever, and that it was a form of fraud to assign the course to a teacher whose command of English was inadequate to communicate his knowledge of the subject.

I did note with interest that the 3 murderers who escaped from the Arizona penitentiary last week all had surnames that suggested that they were Real Americans and fluent speakers of English.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mullins, Bill AMRDEC" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
Date: Monday, August 2, 2010 9:55 am
Subject: Re: Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On
> Behalf Of
> > Tom Zurinskas
> > Sent: Sunday, August 01, 2010 3:07 AM
> > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> > Subject: Is my accent a crime?
> >
> > Arizona has decided that it's unacceptable to have teachers
> > whose spoken English is deemed to be heavily accented or
> ungrammatical, even
> > though the latter has little to do with the former.
>
> Anyone who has gone through an engineering curriculum at a state school
> in the last generation probably has horror stories of trying to
> understand a lecture given by a non-native born grad student whose
> accent was so thick as to make communication impossible.  I know I do.
>
> The idea that the teaching of English to those who can't speak it should
> be done only by people who _can_ speak it, clearly and well, with a
> native accent, is not all that draconian a restriction.
>
>
> >
> > That prohibition led the great Andrei Codrescu, an author who taught
> English
> > for 40 years but who came from Romania, to wonder out loud on NPR,
> "Did I land
> > back behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago?
>
> "Not being able to get paid to teach English if you have a thick accent"
> = "behind the Iron Curtain"?  Overreact much?
>
> >
> > Yet what is an accent?
>
> If the original author doesn't know the answer to this question, then
> there are probably multiple reasons he/she shouldn't be teaching
> English.
>
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org