If you have spent any time around undergraduate STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students you have likely heard complaints about the accents of their non-native English speaking instructors. It is an instructor’s job to teach, after all – how frustrating for an accent to get in the way and, sometimes, even be perceived as making the material more difficult to learn. These complaints about the perceived incomprehensibility of foreign-born professors or graduate student instructors run rampant amongst U.S. undergraduates studying STEM fields. A survey of students’ perceptions of instructor accents showed that only 29.7% of respondents agreed with the statement, “Foreign accent of a faculty does not affect my ability to learn.” (Kavas, 2008) Sometimes this frustration is communicated from student to parent and the negative language attitudes are revealed in alumni magazines, as in the example shown below (Lippi-Green, 2012).
“A more recent experience concerns my daughter, a recent graduate of the engineering college. Most of her undergraduate experience was with TAs, many of whom were ill equipped to communicate the language let alone ideas. For $10,000 a year in out-of-state tuition we expected more.” – Fall 1993; letter to the “Alumni Voices” section of the University of Michigan LSA magazine. (Lippi-Green, 2012)
The pervasiveness of language attitudes in university-level STEM education is in part due to the large proportion of foreign-born academics and the perceived difficulty of these fields. Thousands of academics from around the world come to the U.S. as immigrants or on visas; in STEM, these scholars can make up a large portion of faculty while, in other fields, their representation can be relatively invisible (Gahungu, 2011). Further, the perceived difficulty of STEM subjects can lead to greater frustration toward communication and understanding barriers.
Linguists would remind us, however, that communication is a two-way street. While training and preparing instructors to teach courses in English is important, students have an equal responsibility as listeners to confront their biases and train themselves to understand. Professors and graduate students coming from other countries are facing a myriad of challenges; the least U.S. students can do is meet them halfway.
Students are often not taking up this responsibility and, in fact, let biases and stereotypes about ethnicity drive their perception of accents more than the accents themselves. A study by Rubin and Smith (1992) showed that students can hear the exact same lecture but, when given different photos representing the speaker (one caucasian and one asian), make different assessments of the teaching quality. When presented with a science lecture, the students rated the correctness of the lecture 12.5 when shown a caucasian instructor and 7.31 when shown an asian instructor (scoring out of 14).
To confront this communication issue, supplementing instructor training with explicit linguistic instruction for undergraduates may be a solution. After all, miscommunication is a lose-lose situation and it is only fitting for both parties to meet in the middle with training for increased cross-cultural awareness. A study examining the effects of linguistic training for second language english comprehension produced positive results. Social work students who received specific training in Vietnamese English accents gained significant confidence in their ability to interact successfully with second language english speakers (Derwing, 2002). Interventions with explicit linguistic training like in this study provide a possible route for reconciling the frustrations and negative attitudes of U.S. undergraduates towards non-native English speaking instructors.
Works Cited:
Derwing, T. M., Rossiter, M. J. & Munro, M. J. Teaching Native Speakers to Listen to Foreign-accented Speech. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 23, 245–259 (2002).
Gahungu, A. Integration of Foreign-Born Faculty in Academia: Foreignness as an Asset. International Journal of Educational Leadership Preparation 6, (2011).
Kavas, A. & Kavas, A. An exploratory study of undergraduate college students’ perceptions and attitudes toward foreign accented faculty. College Student Journal (2008).
Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent. Routledge, 2012.
Rubin, D. L. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Res High Educ 33, 511–531 (1992).