Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Jonathan Lighter]

The precise wording of the law is elduing me, but here are a couple of
seemingly useful sites. The first gives some background; the second is the
CNN report:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/30/arizona-ethnic-studies-cl_n_558731.html


http://amfix.blogs.cnn.com/2010/05/24/arizona-wants-to-reassign-teachers-with-accents/

JL



On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 10:31 AM, George Thompson <george.thompson at nyu.edu>wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Is my accent a crime? (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> > >
> > > 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
>



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