[lg policy] Buffalo: Sometimes, learning can get lost in the translation: Foreign teachers' speech can be hard to understand

[Harold Schiffman]

Sometimes, learning can get lost in the translation: Foreign teachers'
speech can be hard to understand
By Lou Michel


 Patrick Flatley was eager to study math when he enrolled at the
University at Buffalo. But he says he encountered an unexpected
obstacle that had nothing to do with complex formulas. The Elma
resident could not figure out what his math instructor was saying —
because of the teacher's heavy foreign accent. "I couldn't understand
the teacher, so I dropped the course before the first exam so I
wouldn't be penalized," Flatley said. "It was very upsetting." A year
later, the 19-year-old, who aspires to become an accountant, says he
is taking the same calculus and statistics course and getting high
marks.  "I have a teacher with a New York City accent, and I have an
"A' so far," Flatley said. "Don't tell me there aren't teachers out
there who can't speak English."

Flatley's situation illustrates a language barrier that sometimes
occurs at UB, which welcomes students and instructors from all over
the world. But the global perspective comes at a price for some
students who struggle to understand international professors and
teaching assistants whose accents, pronunciation and, in some cases,
misuse of words result in knowledge getting lost in the translation.
UB officials take issue with the criticism, saying they receive very
few complaints.

By design, they say, the university is a melting pot intended to
expose students to some of the brightest minds in the world.

"It is our intention to internationalize the campus. In their future
careers, students will have to interact with people from all over the
world and be able to understand their background and even their
accents," said John T. Ho, interim vice provost for graduate
education.

Attracting high-caliber educators from around the world, Ho added,
benefits the United States economically and competitively, noting that
several of the 2009 American recipients of the Nobel prizes in
medicine, physics and chemistry were immigrants.

But inside the classrooms and lecture halls, students told The Buffalo
News, they face linguistic challenges.

"If you're in a lecture hall with 300 people and you're not sitting up
close, it's hard to understand," said Tony Scrace, a senior from
Lockport majoring in international business and world trade. "I have
two international teachers, one is from Haiti and the other is Asian.
They speak broken English. The words are not the same and sometimes
their presentations have grammatical errors in them."

The language barrier in higher education goes well beyond UB.

Other universities and colleges find it necessary to turn to the
global labor pool because Americans with advanced degrees often seek
better paying jobs in private industry rather than education,
according to a spokesman for the American Association of University
Professors in Washington, D.C.

"The fundamental problem is continued underfunding and defunding of
higher education at a time when there are critical needs in science
and engineering and increasing numbers of students," said Martin D.
Snyder, whose organization represents 48,000 university and college
professors and academic professionals.

In addition, prior to entering college, students are not pushed in the
direction of complex technical fields, Snyder said.

"The American education system does such a poor job of encouraging
students from elementary school on to pursue careers in science; and
those who do, prefer to work in industry where the compensation is
much, much higher," he said.

As a result, he said, universities have long grappled for long periods
with complaints that faculty who speak English as a second language
sometimes have difficulty communicating.

UB officials say they have made substantial progress in this area,
carefully vetting prospective professors and limiting the duties of
international graduate teaching assistants who lack a solid command of
the English language.

For more than two decades, classes have been provided at UB for
teaching assistants who need to improve their language skills,
according to Keith E. Otto, who heads UB's
English-as-a-second-language program, one of the first in the country.

Those unable to clearly speak English, Otto said, are given duties
outside the classroom, such as grading papers.

When international professors seek employment at UB, the interview
process lasts several days and the candidate meets with a number of
people, according to John J. Wood, associate vice provost for
international education.

"They give teaching demonstrations, which goes not only to the mastery
of their material, but how well they present it, and English is a
factor," Wood said.

Mohan's experiences

Satish Mohan, the Amherst town supervisor who plans to return to his
post as a professor in UB's Engineering Department in January, says he
is not without sympathy for students who say they have difficulty
understanding what's being taught.

A native of India, he said he has encountered international educators
at UB who have struggled with their English.

In a diplomatic way, Mohan said he would sometimes share with them his
story of improving his own diction.

"When the students would ask me questions, I immediately wrote down
that perhaps this sentence or word was not clear. Then what I did, I
chose an ideal English speaker and that was Peter Jennings. I listened
to Peter Jennings all the time and then repeated after him," Mohan
said of the late ABC News anchorman.

Mohan explained that he realized he had an obligation to not only have
mastery of the subject he was imparting to students, but that it had
to be delivered in a clear and understandable manner.

If students complained about his English, he said he never took it personally.

"I did not take it as an attack on myself that my speech is not like
what students hear or speak. But since my job was to teach them, one
of my first initial efforts was to speak the way they understand," he
said.

Mohan is not alone in recognizing that difficulties exist in getting
concepts across when there is a language barrier.

"There is a loss, I will admit that," said Qi Dong, a UB economics
doctoral student from China who works as a teaching assistant. "For
me, some questions are very abrupt, and I'm not perfectly prepared for
that."

Aaron Hargrave, a UB nuclear medicine technology graduate, said
teaching assistants are often responsible for helping students grasp
complicated information.

"You go to professors to hear the lectures, the big overall ideas, and
you go to the TAs to get down to the nitty-gritty. You ask them your
specific questions and you take your quizzes with them," said
Hargrave, of Lewiston.

But when a student struggles to comprehend what the teaching assistant
is saying, he said, it compounds an already challenging situation.

Teaching assistants, Dong says, have an obligation to thoroughly
familiarize themselves with course material in order to get the main
points across to students who seek their help.

"I do think that 80 to 90 percent of the information can be
transferred," he said, adding that students should make use of office
hours and study groups to succeed.

Some students, however, said that as the semester progresses, they
develop an ear for the accent, though it is difficult initially.

American-born students, Snyder added, need to embrace diverse
education environments, if they want to be successful.

"Even though the students sometimes deny it, they are resistant to
someone from a different culture, someone from a different educational
background," Snyder said. "They are so narrow and parochial that they
can't open up to that person."

Spinoff benefits

Scrace, the international business student, says non-American
professors do enrich course material.

"They bring a lot to the table in respect to business aspects from
other parts of the world. Some have worked for years outside the
United States and travel two or three times or more a year," he said.
"They definitely know what is going on in their home regions."

An unintended benefit, Snyder says, is that students who seek each
other's help in study groups often do better than those who go it
alone.

"The fact is in any class, even one taught by the most accomplished
speaker of English, students who work together in groups are always
going to get better results.

"Part of that is they're taking the initiative to learn, they're
taking responsibility for their education. They are talking to one
another, raising and answering questions which might not be obvious
things for the teacher to bring up in class," Snyder said.

But if language barriers become unreasonable, he said, students should
speak with their faculty adviser or dean.

Ernesto J. Alvarado, acting president of UB's undergraduate Student
Association, says he is aware of the language difficulties but says
there is no question the university's professors are top notch in
their academic fields.

"I think the university does a great job at hiring professors based on
their understanding of whatever subject they are teaching," Alvarado
said.

Providing another perspective, UB engineering student Robert G. Urtel
questioned why he has to pay tuition if he is expected to teach
himself when a professor can't speak English clearly.

"It makes me feel like I'm being personally cheated out of my tuition
money," said Urtel, a junior. "You have to read the book, try and
learn it on your own and work with other students going through the
same thing

http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/story/832091.html
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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