Accent Monitoring: Innovation Or Rights Violation? 448
theodp writes "After almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers' articulation, the NY Times' Marc Lacey reports that a federal investigation of possible civil rights violations has prompted Arizona to call off its accent police. The teachers who were found to have strong accents were not fired, but their school districts were required to work with them to improve their speech. Interestingly, one person's civil rights violation is another's 'wonderful little phenomenon', which is how PBS described the accent neutralization classes attended by Bangalore call center workers who worked for the likes of IBM and Microsoft. On its website, IBM Daksh notes that 'To make sure that customers all over the world can understand the way our people speak, every new hire is trained in what we call voice and accent neutralization.' So, is accent monitoring and neutralization a civil right violation, as the U.S. Depts. of Justice and Education suggest, or is it an 'innovation', as IBM argues?"
Civil rights violation to be asked to speak clear? (Score:4, Insightful)
WTF .. is this real? Wait, how about the language itself .. As a Vulcan, why shouldn't I have the right to teach an English Literature class in Vulcan ? .. And why should I be forced to teach English Literature if I don't know it .. so how about I teach physics in my English literature class, in Vulcan?
And to the DOE and DOJ, I ask how about coming up with ideas that make sense? My civil right to mental clarity and logic is being violated.
Context (Score:5, Insightful)
Innovation or violation?
Once again, context is everything.
"clear" is an interesting judgement call. I am pretty sure that when used by the state in Arizona, this amounted to selective cultural bias and harassment. That would be constant with the other developments in that benighted corner of the US.
I bet if you talk like Andy Devine or Beauford T. Pusser, no one in Arizona schools bats an eye at your "accent" or worries about the "clarity" of pronunciation.
Neutralization an offense? (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, their neutralized accent is a job tool. It is no more a rights violation than being expected to know how to use MS Word.
It depends (Score:5, Insightful)
If nobody can understand what a teacher is saying, then how much benefit do the students get from that teacher? Those students may be better off staying home and reading a book. Plenty of college professors fall into this category, but most of them aren't hired based on their teaching ability. For those whose job descriptions include communication, a thick unintelligible accent can be a serious hindrance.
That said, if someone has a trace of an accent but he or she is completely understandable, then there shouldn't be a problem. Some of the examples given in TFA I would consider ridiculous. But, if parents are complaining that their children can't understand their teachers, a remedial course to mitigate a thick accent might be beneficial.
college (Score:2, Insightful)
As a reality check, maybe we should compare with what happens at the college level. At US research universities, you get profs and TAs who are there because of their research. Many of them have strong accents. With grad students, it's common to assign the ones with really unintelligible accents to grade papers rather than to TA discussion sections or labs. When it comes to profs, I'm sure you can find people who will recount horror stories of unintelligible lecturers, but in reality I think that's very uncommon. It's not unusual to find profs who have strong accents, and in some cases they may be strong enough that they are initially difficult to understand, but in almost all cases students learn to understand their accents fairly rapidly. The key here is that these people are highly educated, they've usually done most or all of their higher education in English, and they use English all day long. They may pronounce "th" as "d," but they are smart people who know how to use words precisely. It works. Nothing bad happens (except in a tiny minority of cases).
So if it's good enough for Berkeley or Harvard, why is it not good enough for an elementary school in Phoenix?
Of course the answer is that this isn't really about the quality of teaching, it's about xenophobia.
BTW, kids don't emulate their teachers' accents. They generally make fun of them. They get their accents from their friends, from TV, from music, and, to a lesser extent, from the people they interact with in the community.
The real issue is whether these teachers use correct grammar and diction, know how to punctuate a sentence, etc. That has nothing to do with their accents. We already have mechanisms for making sure that people who teach our kids to write an essay are able to write a good essay themselves. These mechanisms don't always work (mainly because market forces make it impossible to set the bar too high), but that has nothing to do with accents.
The slashdot story's comparison with Indian call center workers is ridiculous. When you're on the phone with someone you've never met, it's much harder to understand that person's accented speech than it would be in person with someone you were familiar with. The call center workers' job consists of nothing but talking to people on the phone, all day. Of course it's a bigger deal for them to have neutral accents.
Re:I guess it depends on the politics of the State (Score:2, Insightful)
Republicans, you mean the same ones that want to roll back various civil rights legislation and voting protections? Don't you think that the repeated attempts to disenfranchise minority voters has something to do with the interpretation?
It's easy to pretend like motivation doesn't have anything to do with it, but at the end of the day if you come from a party that's known for racist behavior it can take a long time for the reputation to die. Even longer if you're actively encouraging it with overtly xenophobic rhetoric.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
"Sorry, but you sound kind of funny, go take this class and we'll try again"
What's wrong with that? There is a serious problem understanding some accents, to the point where it impairs understanding and become a block to learning.
I personally have a very difficult time understanding the sing song English speech of people from India. And I'm not alone.
If I were trying to learn anything, such as taking a class, I would be at a huge disadvantage.
If every kid in the class is giving each other the "Whaddie Say" head twist you aren't getting your money's worth.
The kids are getting cheated, as well as the tax payer.
A slight accent that does not impair understanding isn't what these monitors were looking for.
The ability to communicate is paramount for a teacher. They were there to make sure the kids weren't
being taught improper english, and that they were able to understand the lesson.
Lemmy AXE you dis?
Where would YOU draw the line?
It's all relative (Score:2, Insightful)
Someone from South Carolina thinks they speak normally and that the person from the Bronx has a funny accent; the person from the Bronx thinks the reverse; and a person from London thinks they're both nuts, innit? Mid-west American and "BBC English" are supposed to be widely understood by American and UK English speakers, but they are still accents.
The example given in the article is ludicrous: 'the state had written up teachers for pronouncing "the" as "da," "another" as "anuder" and "lives here" as "leeves here."' That's not a barrier to communication, that's regional prejudice. I wonder if there are any people from Boston teaching in Arizona and whether they would pass the test.
Also consider how bad it is for non-native speaker (Score:5, Insightful)
We have this problem at my university. Particularly with grad students, we get some with very, very heavy accents and garbled English. Ok well maybe you could try and argue this would all be fine if all the foreign students were from the same place. To them, the accent would be "normal" and you could say the native English speakers need to suck it up and deal, since when you natively speak the language dealing with accents is easier.
Things is, that's not the case. We have students from China, India, Europe, the Middle East, and so on. All of course have different accents, different problems with the language. So how fair is it to the undergrad from Kuwait to ask him to not just learn a second language, but then be able to deal with a Chinese grad student who is badly mispronouncing it, and then an Indian grad student doing the same, but in a different way?
Then think about the same situation for primary education, when language skills are less developed. How fair would it be to a third grader who immigrated from Mexico, who's still working on language in general never mind English, to be taught by someone who has a heavy Chinese accent and speech errors? How well do you think that child will learn?
Also what some people call an accent (Score:5, Insightful)
Is even more serious. I work at a university with lots of foreign students so I get a lot of exposure to accents of all types. However for a good number of our foreign grad students, it goes beyond just an accent, it is straight out poor English skills. The easy way to tell is if the "accent" continues in e-mail, the written word. You, for example, do not. Your written word gives away no hint that you have anything but a mastery of the language. Someone would need to hear you speak to determine that you weren't a native speaker.
However we have plenty of students that is not the case for. They send in an e-mail for support that, well, has an accent. The language is misused and done so in a particular way that you can hear it in your head in the accent. Verbs are incorrectly conjugated, word order is mixed up, terms are used improperly and so on.
That isn't just an "accent" that means their English skills are poor. However you'll see people try to pass it off as such. "Oh they just don't like my accent." No, that isn't the real problem, the problem is you are improperly using the language. You are trying to lean on the fact that you are not a native speaker as an excuse for not improving your skills.
Re:Context (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, some levels of clear are not judgement calls. Some "accents" are simply lazy nonsense. As a man once married to a filipina, I can attest that a huge portion is just mental laziness. If a person can hear when their accent is being mimicked, then they know when they are saying it wrong. The mix of F and P sounds is simply ridiculous as the sounds are not even remotely the same. Worse, when she heard a word for the first time, she would mentally spell it in her mind and then pronounce it "her way" despite that the first time encountering a word was audible rather than written.
Some accents are beyond understandable and tries the patience of all who try to listen.
And as someone who has a great deal of experience learning and dealing with the Japanese and Mandarin languages, I can say without any reservation that different people hear things in different ways. US English speakers hear consonant sounds primarily while Japanese hear vowel sounds primarily. And, of course, Mandarin speakers hear pitch primarily, so that's a whole other thing.
While taking a Japanese language class, one of my classmates was British. He insisted on speaking his form of Japanese with his British accent. And so I had to ask him, "what good is it to learn to speak a language when the people won't understand you because you keep changing the sounds of the vowels?" This, of course, brings me to my main point in all of this.
If the people you speak to cannot understand you, then your accent is most assuredly a self-imposed handicap. If you can't do it right, you might as well not do it at all, in my opinion. Personally, I am rather good at understanding even the strongest of accents but I am very sympathetic to those who aren't as good at listening as I know very well what it means to a straining mind to lose a transfer of information because the data stream is difficult to decode rapidly enough.
And when we are talking about school teachers with accents, we are talking about young minds which are already straining to learn their new material, now we have to strain their minds further by making it more difficult for them to understand what is being taught? Which is worse? To ensure the best potential for student education or to coddle self-imposed linguistic handicaps of a smaller group of people? We need to look to the future and not hold education back any more than necessary. And if IMPROVING a NECESSARY SKILL is a rights violation, then we might as well stop teaching English in public schools, forget about spelling and grammar or anything where linguistic skills count.
If teachers can't speak, how will students?
Grammar Police (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, I can't stand it.
While many of the customers on that particular support line would of been American, I was not.
What you meant there was "would have been". Using "would of been" indicates to an educated person that you are practically illiterate, and don't understand what you are saying, and thus your entire point is missed because you portray yourself as not having enough of an education to respond adequately to any subject.
Seriously, look those two words up in the dictionary, and figure out why it's so retarded and infuriating to anyone with a decent vocabulary when people write things the way they are used to saying them without knowing what the phrase actually means, or how their accent has colored their ability to communicate.
I'm not saying that you are stupid, I am merely pointing out that you look stupid when you say things as you have spoken them, rather than as they are actually supposed to have been written.
It doesn't matter the language. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Context (Score:4, Insightful)
The friggin' job of a teacher is to impart knowledge through communication. It is therefore incumbent on the teacher not the student to facilitate the communication.
I love accents. I can do many and do frequently. Yet I have had a physics professor with a Hindi accent so thick that 100% of his class was failing. That is his fault and his alone.
Re:Context (Score:4, Insightful)
Very good point (Score:4, Insightful)
Then I suggest not immigrating to a country where you are incapable of speaking the language understandably.
But that's not the case here. Native Spanish speakers can learn English without advanced training if they want to. I'm betting her problem is more about wanting to push her Hispanic identity over American (very common). These people want the host country to bend for them, and I find that insulting to the host country. They have a duty to assimilate.
I knew a Hispanic girl, fom Spain, working among Americans. It took me a while to catch the barest hint of an accent. She learned English in regular school and while living with Americans. Same with Germans in the US, some pretty thick, some it takes a minute to catch it, some have no German accent at all.