[lg policy] Removing teachers with "accented" speech?

[Harold Schiffman]

Removing teachers with "accented" speech?

June 3, 2010 @ 6:05 am ·

Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and politics, Language teaching
and learning


It's been widely reported that the Arizona Department of Education has
begun working to remove teachers whose English-language skills are
viewed as inadequate. According to press reports, the evaluators aim
(among other things) to remove teachers with "accents", which probably
means Spanish accents in most cases. Casey Stegall, "Arizona Seeks to
Reassign Heavily Accented Teachers", Fox News 5/22/2010, wrote:

After passing the nation's toughest state immigration enforcement law,
Arizona's school officials are now cracking down on teachers with
heavy accents. The Arizona Department of Education is sending
evaluators to audit teachers and their English speaking skills to make
sure districts are complying with state and federal laws. Teachers who
are not fluent in English, who make grammatical errors while speaking
or who have heavy accents will be temporarily reassigned. "As you
expect science teachers to know science, math teachers to know math,
you expect a teacher who is teaching the kids English to know
English," said Tom Home, state superintendent of public instruction.


The basis for this crack-down is said to be a clause in the Federal
"No Child Left Behind" act, which makes it a condition of federal aid
to states that teachers be fluent in English. According to the same
article, In 2000, [Arizona] voters passed a referendum which
stipulated that instruction of these classes be offered only in
English. Then in 2003, President Bush's No Child Left Behind act
stated schools couldn't receive federal funding unless an English
teacher was totally fluent in the language.

The date given in this article appears to be wrong — the No Child Left
Behind act was passed by Congress in 2001, and signed by the president
in January of 2002. The text of the law does state, in any case, that

Each eligible entity receiving a subgrant under section 3114 shall
include in its plan a certification that all teachers in any language
instruction educational program for limited English proficient
children that is, or will be, funded under this part are fluent in
English and any other language used for instruction, including having
written and oral communications skills.

It seems appropriate to require English teachers to be "fluent in
English". However, there's nothing in the law about "accent", and the
information on teacher quality evaluation at the U.S. Department of
Education doesn't seem to say anything about this either. This
omission is probably for good reason, as explained at length in a
statement from the Linguistics Department of the University of Arizona
on the "Teachers’ English Fluency Initiative in Arizona".

This statement was sent to Governor Jan Brewer and Superintendent Tom
Horne, with the following cover letter:

Dear Governor Brewer and Superintendent Horne:

I am attaching a statement prepared by our faculty in response to the
news that "the Arizona Department of Education recently began telling
school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be
heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for
students still learning English."

As scientists, as educators, as citizens, and as state employees, we
feel it is our duty to provide the scientific facts that are relevant
so that  state leaders and citizens can make informed decisions.

If there's anything we can do to help or clarify this, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Mike Hammond
Head, Linguistics
U. of Arizona

They express the relevant facts, as they see them, as the following
eight points:

1) ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or
‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2) Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered
grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3) Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach
English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don't
speak Spanish.
4) Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents
helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5) It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well
as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part
of their education.
6) There are many different 'accents' within English that can affect
intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not
dialects of English.
7) Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or
‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing
patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8) There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies
aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are
paradoxical.

The remaining five pages of their statement explain these assertions
and back them up with references.

Does anyone know what formal criteria the Arizona evaluators have been
told to use? Since the Fox News report on the situation seems unable
even to get the date of the NCLB law correct, I'm reluctant to trust
their assertions about the nature of the Arizona teacher evaluation.
There are other press reports that seem to be less careless — the
Arizona Linguistics Department's statement references (what I take to
be) this WSJ article — but still.

[Some commentary on various sides of this issue:

Matthew Balan, "CNN Spins Arizona's English Ed. Standard as Accent
'Crackdown,' 'Ban'"
Andrei Codrescu, "Arizona Education Loses The Accent Of America"
David Edwards, "Arizona cracks down on teachers with heavy accents"
"Arizona English Educators Under Scrutiny (Video) Teachers And Accents"
Maya Prabhu, "Arizona law worries non-native educators"
Christopher Peterson, "Strong Accents Define America"
Amanda Terkel, "Arizona Superintendent: It’s A Big Problem If Teachers
Have Accents And Pronounce ‘Comma’ As ‘COH-ma’"
Valerie Straus, "How Arizona is checking teachers’ accents"
Valerie Strauss, "Concern over accented teachers not original to Arizona"
Bret Kofford, "Life Out Here: They could not teach in Arizona"

In particular, note this CNN story:



And compare the commentary on it by Matthew Balan, linked above, which
sees the CNN report as helping to "perpetuate the liberal talking
point about Arizona's supposedly racist campaign against illegal
immigrants". Then you could throw Andrei Codrescu's commentary into
the mix: "This would be a much better country if everyone just kept
quiet and handed his proof of citizenship to the police."

Politics aside, the most useful discussion that I've found of what's
actually happening comes from a blog post by Valerie Strauss, which
includes this material supplied by Amy Rezzonico, a spokesperson for
the Department of Education:

2008-09 school year - The Arizona Dept of Education monitored 73
School Districts. Seven of these were cited “for a fluency problem.”

Number of teachers observed: 1,529.
Number of teachers found to have pronunciation problems: 25

School districts are required to submit a plan to the education
department about what they will do to help the cited teachers.

"Not one plan submitted by a school district talked of removal of the
teacher," she wrote. Instead the plans said that professional
development would be provided to ensure the teacher is highly
qualified….

2009-10 school year — The education department monitored 61 districts
and found 9 districts were cited for fluency.

Number of teachers monitored and cited for fluency issues is not yet
known because the data is still being compiled and evaluated.

Other reports suggest that some teachers have been re-assigned, but
I'm not sure how to square those reports with this information.
Perhaps those are local reactions rather than moves mandated by the
state?

Via Strauss, Rezzonico also provides excerpts from the monitoring form
that evaluators are using, which includes this bit of unintentional
irony:

If the monitor hears a message that is incomprehensive in English from
the instructor, this constitutes a “NO" response.

Presumably "incomprehensive" is a malapropism for "incomprehensible" —
the OED does allow the meaning "Not to be comprehended or understood;
incomprehensible", but flags it as obsolete, with the most recent
citation in 1791.  This seems to count as an instance of the very next
item on the check-list:

If the monitors hear words used that are impeding communication, this
constitutes a “NO” response.

Quis cusdodiet ipsos custodes?]

June 3, 2010 @ 6:05 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and
politics, Language teaching and learning


http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2365
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