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Accent Monitoring: Innovation Or Rights Violation?
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?"
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.
As a foreigner, i completely support that. If you have that strong of an accent such that people cannot understand you, you have a problem. Independent of whether you're a foreigner or not, I can't understand ~10% of the people I meet on a daily basis. In rome, do the romans!
"Sorry, but you sound kind of funny, go take this class and we'll try again"
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
I expect that it would be seen as a great idea if a Democrat-controlled State had thought of it.
Alas, a Republican-controlled State thought of it, so it's evil.
Until the Republicans get control of the Federal government, at least. After that, it'll only be evil if a Democrat-controlled State suggests it.
That said, I approve of the idea in general. There's not a really good reason why students should have to wade through the teacher's accent to figure out what she's saying.
Plus we get the added benefit of teaching the kids to speak intelligibly. I expect that's needed in Arizona.
And I know it's needed in Louisiana. No, not because of the Mexicans, because of the Cajuns - I've lived here 20+ years, and still can't understand someone with a thick Cajun accent.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
in the US its a civil rights issue
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Civil rights is for when you're in a government job ... innovation is for private corporations overseas (keyword).
If a corporation hires you to stand on the street swinging a sign in a tutu, they are allowed. Nothing about asking people to speak in a way that maximizes profits is a violation of civil rights. However government action requiring people speak in a specific way because they want people to talk that way is a potential problem.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
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?"
Does theodp not realise that there is a difference between a government department and a private international organisation?
Or that perhaps voice training in Bangalore is not covered by US civil rights legislation?
Mod this submission -1 flamebait please.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
If it was fine when the phone company did it to train their operators to speak unaccented english, then it should be fine for the schools to require their teachers to do so as well. If an english teacher has an excessive accent, that may be especially problematic. Even non-language teachers should be able to communicate effectively. The extreme case of this is the college T.A., who like the cabby, speaks fewer than 100 words of english; and those, heavily accented.
Why can't it be both an innovation and a civil rights violation?
No. If you are paid to talk to people on the phone, you need to be clear. People whose accents are too heavy - even if they know their stuff - can be incoherent to callers. The employer isn't forcing them to talk that way outside of work, or necessarily even when not on the phone.
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.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I think a key here is that the employees are being singled out. if every teacher had to attend an accent-nomalization class, there is no discrimination.
In fact, the summary even states that this is exactly what IBM did.
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.
When your accent is a speech impediment, you have a problem.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"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?"
Provided the individual is easily understood an accent is utterly irrelevant save for some language classes. One of the best teachers I ever had was Mr. Tsang, my AP English teacher. Nearly 20 years later I still remember examining Shakespeare and Kafka in that class. If you had older siblings or friends who had taken his class he was always recommended. He also had a heavy Chinese accent; when he was in his teens he and his family fled from the Cultural Revolution in the PRC.
I'm a resident alien in the U.S. I do speak English with an accent, though mine is much milder than that of most of my compatriots. Regardless, if I were aspiring to teach children of native English speakers in a school in a country where English is the majority and de-facto standard language, I would expect to be required to conform to certain norms regarding pronunciation. This is especially true in junior school, where children are still learning to speak right and rapidly acquiring vocabulary, and being exposed to a strong accent may undesirably affect their speech patterns.
If the speech of two people is not mutually intelligible, they are not going to be able to communicate effectively, which is sort of the whole point of them using a common language.
People with heavy accents that wish to improve their communication skills should be able to take these innovative classes. It improves their value to that market.
On the other hand, public school kids should not be stuck with teachers that lack the skills to communicate effectively. This applies to teachers with unintelligible accents as well as those who are simply incompetent. If the bad teachers are not rehabilitated, the students are being denied equal access to education.
I am pretty sure you should have used "clearly" in that post title. Which might be just a teensy bit ironic. Not sure.
Just accents? How about handwriting.
I remember my first day in Calculus 2 in University. Half-a-dozen of us were in class, waiting on the professor and discussing what was taught in the class in the prior hour.
All four walls had blackboards that were covered in a scrawl. Our best guess was Hebrew or another Semitic language.
Then the professor walks in and asks "have you copied down everything from the boards, yet?" We were dumbfounded. His handwriting made the average doctor look like a penmanship winner.
Three of us passed that semester. The rest gave up in despair.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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.
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It's not civil right violation to be asked to speak clear, but it is to be pressed to speak without your native accent. It's not about teaching Shakespeare in Vulcan, it's about being able to teach it in Texan English, Hiberno English, Canadian English or whatever.
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Government versus private entity isn't relevant, however US versus Indian law is very important indeed. Given what a cash cow call centers are in India, I'd be surprised if it wasn't legal.
I am pretty sure you should have used "clearly" in that post title. Which might be just a teensy bit ironic. Not sure.
That's okay, Avril - we already knew you didn't write your own songs.
#DeleteChrome
I applaud the efforts of the Arizona officials. A smooth English accent makes the speaker sound smarter and more attractive. I hope my children can learn to speak with English accents instead of the muddled Mid-Atlantic American that is so common in these parts.
Yes, I can imagine a case where a teacher's English is so bad it is a real impediment to learning. But I would only agree to taking action in pretty extreme cases.
business needs to do with the overseas help desk and other customer service.
Freshman physics discussion group, led by a postdoc from India. First day, he kept talking about "el squaw". The whole hour was about this Hispanic Indian maiden and her relationship to other constants. Went home and read the chapter. The young woman turned out to be L squared.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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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.
Its about bloody time you blokes learned to speak the Queen's English!
Have gnu, will travel.
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?
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There are specialists in making you sound appropriate for whatever role.
There are many who specialize in making Canadians sound more like Americans.
When part of your job is communicating and being understood, a strong accent could interfere with your ability to do the job.
I was born and raised in California and now I'm going to school in electrical engineering. This major tends to have many professors who are either Indian, Middle Eastern, or Asian. And for someone raised with exposure to basically only "normal" (basically my own accent) and Spanish accents (and I'm still bad with understanding those), it's very hard to understand some of my professors. I'm sorry, but you may be knowledgeable in a subject, but that doesn't mean you don't have to at least put an effort into making yourself understandable to the average person with an "American" accent (you know what I mean). I don't know if what is being done in the article is "right", but from the STUDENTS perspective, it can be difficult. And I want to make sure people understand that although the people I talked about teaching my classes above aren't typically white, my difficulty with accents really doesn't hold any prejudice, I usually have a hard time with British or general European accents.
Basically, if your accent is so strong that your students aren't understanding you, you need to do something about it! That is, if you give a shit about the students. Unfortunately a lot of times nowadays, the teacher's don't care much about the student, but thats another topic...
If you're doing it to improve customer service by making sure that everyone can understand everyone else through a global network of call centers, it's innovation. It's the vocal equivalent of requiring employees to wear uniforms when they're interacting with customers. If you're doing it because you don't like Hispanics who are CLEARLY illegal immigrants because their first language isn't English, rights violation, or at least discrimination. PS French isn't my first language, yet the French people I know seem to really appreciate my effort to speak their language, in spite of an American accent.
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.
In uni I had lecturers from China, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia among other places. I could understand them. The two hardest to understand were one lady who was extremely soft spoken. Had to sit in the front to hear her, even with a mic. The absolute hardest was a scottish guy. I had no idea what he was saying, even with a presentation up that he was speaking to. And english was his native language! All the foreign nationals put more effort into learning a second language than he did his first.
Yay me!
It would be interesting to know whether there is a correlation between people who failed the accent test and people who are visible minorities. But even if the accent test is purely based on sound, then it surely must violate the civil liberties of any U.S. citizen to travel freely and work anywhere within the United States -- I cannot believe that it could be legal to discriminate against someone because they sound like they are from out-of-state. Anyway, if you are truly going by sound alone, a Spanish accent is no stranger than a Boston accent, or a Brooklyn accent, or a Charleston accent.
What a wanker.
Where do we begin? How about starting with a simple civics lesson. People of India (the country in which Bangalore rests) do not have the same rights as the people of the US.
We could move on to another civics lesson: An investigation does not mean that something has been done wrong. It simply means someone thinks perhaps something was done wrong. (I know the pesky media want to equate investigation with being guilty, but that isn't how it really works.)
Beyond that, in one case people are told up front that they will be given the class. Contrast this with someone being on a job and the first they know about the program is when their boss tells them they must take additional lessons. Yes, there is another difference.
Call centers in India have good reason to Americanize (not "neutralize") the accents of the workers there. But the Arizona case reminds me of my grandfather, who was born and raised in a certain rural area of Canada, and got a job teaching in the same area. So if ever there was a local accent, it was my grandfather's. But some fool administrator with a Scottish brogue so thick nobody could understand him sat in on one of my grandfather's classes and marked him for his "foreign" accent, which in his ignorance he didn't recognize as a local variant. I sincerely hope nobody is doing something like that in Arizona.
I never knew some part of the US had language police like Quebec :P
Though seriously, the role of a teacher is to teach. If a teacher is unable to speak in a way that 100% of the students that aren't mentally disabled can understand then there is a problem. Personally, having worked in a call center, just about everyone can be understood, even ESL types with poor grammar. Where the language breaks down is when regional slang doesn't carry over to places outside the area. This is why loan-words are often frowned upon in languages like Chinese and Russian, because those aren't "their" words, even though there are perfectly acceptable loanwords that more people would understand around the world.
Japanese and Korean are perfectly fine with loanwords, and thus even as a foreigner, you can get away with speaking english to some degree if you can just find the right word that is also used as a loanword (examples include "PersoCom" = "Personal Computer", "Cookie", "Cake" (these words often have stretched 'e' sounds in Japanese, but it's clear what it is) and in reverse we have sushi, sashimi, karaoke, that even English speakers will understand due to widespread use.
The hardest "english-like" accents to understand are Caribbean, Scottish and Indian accented English. In these cases they often sound more foreign than they really are. Generic Australian and British accents are easily confused by Americans and Canadians, because they sound close enough without knowledge of the grammar. Likewise with Canadian and American accents. Without knowing the grammar, Canadians just come off as friendlier, even though they are perfectly capable of being as as much of a jerkass as Americans. This largely comes about from different type of hostile legal environment than anything else. Where as Americans have "free speech", Canadians do not. Canadians however don't care about censorship, so things are less censored to begin with, just harder to get into the country.
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I had a math teach who couldn't pronounce the word "X" after he had a stroke. We all hated him because he was so boring to listen to -- he had lost a lot of his speech. Reflecting back, we all acted like spoilt arrogant asses. The guy was doing his best, and we certainly didn't try. Apparently he was a math genius, and we weren't interested in math.
At some stage, children have to learn to drop their sense of entitlement in order to become adults.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
It depends not on where in the world you live, but whether or not you are asked to speak more understandably(to whatever audience) or forced to.
All the other attempts to justify or find some acceptable pattern are abortive. It is as simple as recognizing when violence factors into the action or not. If I discriminate what sites I visit based on the language used, am I coercing site owners to use my preferred language? Of course not. If I hire someone to write content for a website, is discrimination based on familiarity with a specific language force? Again no. So, discrimination on hiring based on particular abilities of potential workers is not a violation of anything but arbitrary laws that have no connection to reality.
Furthermore, any attempt to restrict such actions assumes an understanding of the sum of want-satisfaction of all individuals in society that is not actually possible. It inevitably makes things worse.
Maybe but also correct. In the UK they did a test where they got people to predict someone's intelligence from a piece of audio recording of them talking about a subject. The difference between the official standard English and a heavy Birmingham accent (yes it is a city in England, Google it if you don't know) was 20 IQ points (if the test does correlate with your real intelligence then 100= normal 80 = mildly retarded and 120 = very intelligent). The test group included people with the accent tested, and it did not make them significantly less prejudiced.
Accent neutralization is very common in most major call center operators. it shouldn't be news at this point.
It's not a civil rights violation to ask someone to speak clearly. It is a civil rights violation to discriminate against those who do not speak clearly due to illness or "nationality" (implied for those with foreign accents). So making classes available for those who wish to take them isn't an issue. Singling out people for remediation is illegal.
They aren't teaching class in Vulcan, or Spanish. They are teaching class in English and being told that being Mexican makes them a second-class citizen, and they are required to take Mexican-removal classes to continue to be teachers.
And you are asserting that firing them if they don't become less Mexican is a good thing and not a civil rights violation (not by what you said, but by who you defended by what you said - if you don't like that, learn a little more about the issues before offering up your opinion).
Apropos video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FevVfmog4JA
--
BMO
Whether you're a public or private provider, discrimination based on accent is either legal or it is not. But do you expect the Indian wage slaves to complain about language training if it gets them a job?
Only in America would people think their rights are being violated when they're told to speak clearly in English when doing a job that requires communication. Oh, and Quebec, of course -- they'd have an issue with the "English" part of it. *LOL*
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
If you can't pronounce the words properly, don't teach the language. It's very simple, and no discrimination necessary. In fact I'm sure they'd be willing to have telephone screeners, then there'd be no way for the person to know the nationality or color of the person on the other end of the phone speaking mangled English.
I don't know about you, but I hate it when I can't see the blackboard because the teacher's speaking.
If you can't speak English clearly and articulately, then you are simply not qualified for a job whose primary duty is to communicate various sorts of information by means of the spoken English language. It doesn't matter if the particular accent is mexican, brazilian, italian, french, russion, one of those clicking languages, chinese, due to some genetic or birth defect, or the result of an injury. It is not a civil rights violation to discriminate against such people, it is simply common sense. You wouldn't hire a lifeguard who couldn't swim would you?
Northeastern US here.
In my experience, the accent of those from other US regions or other English-speaking countries is more understandable than the accent of a non-native.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I have trouble understanding anyone with a strong accent. Even people from down south can be very nearly impossible for me to understand. I had a teacher with a heavy Indian accent in college, I had to quit his class because I couldn't understand him. I made up another reason so I didn't hurt his feelings or anything. I think it may be a neurological condition of mine as I also have trouble understanding people when there is noise around. Noise like a fan or traffic can make it impossible to understand what people are saying, I can hear them saying something but I can't pick out the words.
I'm sort of on the fence about this issue. On the one hand, I can see that there needs to be comprehension on the students part. On the other hand, It's feels wrong to pick on the teachers just because they talk "funny". I think providing a class to teachers that have a strong accent to help mollify it would likely be a good practice. I don't think you could force them to go to it but I think it would be okay to let them know that there might be a problem and see if they want to fix it. If they don't, then maybe allow the students out of that class and into another if they can't understand the teacher.
It is biologically impossible for you to be a Vulcan, as they do not exist, so your argument is invalid.
And demonstrably stupid.
QED.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
I checked out the latter link and it by itself showed signs of the problem: It described the accent-correcting application which was written in that new language "VB or 'Virtual Basic'" (SIC) and using "structured Query Language" (SIC). Pathetic.
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.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I spent about a year doing some work for the Seattle school district but quit shortly after I found out there were multiple teachers in the district that they had to hire "translators" for because the teacher could not effectively communicate.
I recall my dad mentioning how his family had been a bit overzealous about not speaking Italian at home.
I think being able to speak the language of the new country is a fair request to make of immigrants, even if they retain their native language amongst themselves. This is especially so for young people who learn new languages better than older people. It seems mainly like an issue of efficient/effective communication.
All of the bilingual this, bilingual that (namely, English and Spanish) is aggravating and reeks of being overly accomodating.
Immigrants and/or minorities not cooperating does seem to contribute to such tensions.
I've taken a harsher stance against illegal immigration lately, but I've long since thought like this on the language issue.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
An accent that is detrimental to learning a specific language should not be allowed. Also, back in my day, we called that problem a speech *impediment*, because it IMPEDES proper and basic communication.
In US law, 'discrimination' relating to a certain characteristic is allowed if the characteristic really is essential to the job.
I can see how "not having a really thick accent" might fall under that for teaching jobs.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
In Madrid they had to kindly ask teachers to moderate their accents while in the classroom, because some where using common street pronunciations that where plain wrong like saying "Madriz" instead of 'Madrid', or saying "fogo" instead of 'Fuego'
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
I'm not a racist. I don't hate people from other religions or places of origin. But I really don't like the notion of a teacher with poor skills in English including accent. If we as a culture have anything at all to be proud of it rests in the body of literature common to England and America. I can live with the fact that some defects are genetic and do not reflect upon the person. The axed instead of asked problem is one and the R sound to some Japanese is more than a challenge.
But I have seen teachers that simply were not capable of speaking on a fifth grade level who were born in America. I am convinced that we have teachers that have never actually studied a subject in their entire lives. They went to college and parroted what they were told and get credentials and the end result is awful. Now we have all kind of junk diplomas and many teachers have degrees from these nonsense establishments. We have released barbarians upon our kids.
I really don't care what subject or grade level a teacher is assigned to but being well read and well spoken are essential precursors for any teaching position. I don't care if it is a gym coach. I want a fairly deep understanding of the body of classic English literature for every employee in the schools right down to the kitchen help and custodians. Kids need good roll models.
Many job listings discriminate against Native-born Americans who do not speak Spanish. Bilingual requirements, along with free classes for non-English speakers to learn English but pay classes to learn Spanish actively discriminate against the White historic native majority in favor of what amounts to Illegal Aliens and their progeny.
What this amounts to is that, being Mexican is a plus, being an ordinary White guy is a minus. That's great if you are Mexican, not so great if you are White. Why should Americans have to speak Spanish? Why shouldn't those who move here, be forced to speak proper English, or move back to Mexico?
After all, the Civil Rights Act demands multilingual ballots, special accommodations, that make native-born Whites third class citizens (because they can be discriminated against, lacking Spanish, while those who speak no or poor English cannot). Pity the poor White kid who doesn't speak Spanish trying to learn from a H1-B Visa teacher (one of the big new deals to make Education spending cheaper) with a terrible accent.
Consider that, in face-to-face conversation, over 90 percent of the communication is in non-verbal clues. The further you get from face-to-face conversation the more important verbal communication becomes.
I just recently joined a call center. ( A couple of months on the 2nd level of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs convinced me that it may be a while before I find a company willing to hire a 64 year-old guy for IT maintenance, and I don't want to re-start my own business at this time.) I work for a contractor for one of the large wireless telephone companies. They showed us some research that said 87% of the customer satisfaction with the communication depends on voice quality and content. I presume classroom teaching is somewhere between one-to-one face-to-face communication and the "voice over the phone" communication. Civil rights aside, reducing accents for voice-only communication and improving classroom presentation skills are not the same task. There are a lot more variables to be addressed in pedagogical presentation than simply voice quality. I'm not even sure that accent would score high on relative importance.
The English (American) spoken language consists of about 80 unique and distinct sounds. Each of them can be represented by a symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). A variation of these phonetic symbols accompanies the entry of each word in most good dictionaries. All of these unique sounds are learn-able and utter-able by the human voice. Learning to speak about 3000 of these words according to their phonetic pronunciation would go a long way toward reducing mis-communication.
The unit of communication is the sentence. In some languages (French and Arabic, for instance) the words are not always sounded out individually, so the whole sentence has to be learned phonetically. This can be a problem and a lot of work, but each time I've made the effort to learn a foreign language phrase phonetically I've been mistaken for someone who really had competency in the language.
If I had some real computing power I'd like to do an AI project that samples lots of examples of common sentences and assigns IPA symbolism to them. Then I would assign the unique IPA sounds to the symbols on my system and see if text-to-speech could be improved. Could a computer listen to someone and determine their native language? Could they translate/respond well enough to be understood correctly? (I can't find the article, but I read a piece of research that said Americans were less frustrated by obvious robot text-to-speech than foreign accents.) Could a computer-enhancement layer between speakers improve communication? Last year I read a pretty good article about a computer system learning English from sampling the 'net. But then what?
I have a couple of Eliza-bots (written in LISP about 12 years ago) where I started to research this, but I ran out of time and resources.
I nearly failed math 11 and had to drop math 12 because of my teacher's heavy indian accents.
I excelled in math up to that point, but I could just flat out not understand them when they spoke half the time.
All I'm going to say is:
"HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE HUE"
But yeah, fuck this shit. I'm perfectly fluent in english and french, yet (go figure) I'll actually adopt an accept in either language if I feel it will help the other party understand what I'm saying. Make the wife every time we catch a cab home, as I turn my smooth french into "immigrant french" and accent it up, because somehow my drunken habits have decided that's the best way to converse with taxi drivers.
Accents are a product of your first language. The fact that English is essentially a mash-up, a hybrid language, should exclude it from accentism. Even those from the United Kingdom aren't really native English, because English itself is a rehash of old frankish, french, and god-knows-what. Those of you who speak a "real" old-world language know what I mean... English is just cobbled together. It is dominant, but that does not make it an authority.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Virtual Basic is so new that you've never even heard of it.
I work with pre-school children, and I think it's very important to pronounce things properly. Although one of my colleagues has a very strong Asian (chinese?) accent, and the kids always seem to know what she's saying. I often have a bit of trouble, and need to ask her to repeat herself...
Ha! Meta-Canadian humour.
It's yet more evidence that lopsided trade is stupid. The math models for claiming lopsided trade is better than tariffs is outdated and flawed, relying on over-simplistic assumptions and misleading case histories. Time for a flush.
Table-ized A.I.
Wadda yu friggin talking bout?
Teaching proper language skills to students is a job requirement.
Requiring a teacher to teach a without an accent is appropriate where the students are learning the language. That is why schools ask for native Spanish speakers to teach Spanish.
One picks up accents that they are exposed to. Do you want students learning "proper" language? Of course when teaching post secondary, it is not important as the language skills are solidified.
Fight Spammers!
It's not civil right violation to be asked to speak clear, but it is to be pressed to speak without your native accent.
Isn't this really a question of marketing? "Accent neutralization" or "voice neutralization" is definitely evil. OTOH if your employment comes with the perquisite of "free elocution lessons" there can hardly be any complaint, can there? ;)
If you native accent is a (more or less) standard flavour of English --and Standard Indian English pronunciation is every bit as much as say Australian or American English standards a proper pronunciation --then yes, I agree, it is mere chauvinism not to recognise that English can be spoken to more than one standard or regional variation.
However if you are learning any (living) language as a "second" language, part of the task is to learn a pronunciation of the language sufficient standard to be easily understood by native speakers of that language. Judging by the output, I feel that there is too much stress on grammar and too little on elocution in much ESL teaching. I had quite a time trying to decipher "wartal" when the (Chinese) guy on the desk next to me was trying to say 'virtual,' just today. We can surely deal much more easily with grammatical errors such as "asked to speak clear [sic]" if we can at least understand the words being uttered. Then again, I'm not an ESL teacher and judging teachers by their students (who don't necessarily make the effort to learn absolutely everything taught to them) is perhaps unfair.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
Which might be just a teensy bit ironic. Not sure.
Depends on how pedantic you want to get about the meaning of 'ironic' <g>
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
What if someone pronounces nuclear as nucular - is it considered as a non-native accent?
"Reality"
Learning about accents and being able to create them at will is an extremely useful skill to have!
I have poor-to-mediocre French, but careful attention to accent permitted me to sound French while in France, within my limited vocabulary. Much better than sounding American. It always surprised the locals when my French fell off the rails.
When in Australia, I learned Strine so I could pass as a local when I needed to. Very useful in pubs.
My favorite American accents are the various Southern flavors. I've mastered a few of them, including much of the unique regional phrases. Useful when this Yankee is around True Sons of the Confederacy.
The thing is, it is always useful to LEARN "accent neutralization" (relative to wherever 'here' is). It is another matter entirely to say you MUST learn it and use it, or what should happen if you can't learn it (not everybody can - it takes a trained ear).
For example, I had a few French teachers who had absolutely terrible accents, sometimes to the point that their French was incomprehensible! I believe it is not wrong to ask language teachers to be reasonably fluent in the languages they teach.
On the other hand, if the accent does not hinder comprehension, then it should not matter at all for teachers of other subjects.
Sometimes, however, heavy accents can actually help. In high school I had a Romanian teacher for American history who had a truly immense English vocabulary, and knew how to use it quite well. But he had an accent so thick a jack-hammer couldn't get through it. As a result, each of us students were literally hanging on his every word, furiously taking notes. It was my best history course EVER! Hence my fond memory of it 40 years later.
In college I had a Chinese physics teacher who used his heavy accent to very humorous effect that was also very endearing to us (and often frustrating to him). For example, while lecturing on angular acceleration he would go to great lengths to avoid saying "r alpha" (it came out "aw awflah"), and would instead write it on the board and say "that thing there" and point to it as needed during his discussion. He happened to be the highest rated professor in the department, and the only department head in the entire university who chose to teach undergraduate classes. Excluding or limiting him for his accent would be a travesty!
A better test may be to identify those students for whom accents limit comprehension. I suspect they could have other things going on, such as damaged hearing or even mild brain disorders, that should receive attention.
In any event, it seems better to emphasize tolerance while also trying to learn new accents (starting with the local one).
Remember the part where you merge with Microsoft Sam. Awesome ending.
That dawned on me one night when I was watching locally rebroadcast CNN and they had an interview with the King of Tonga. He was speaking in perfect Oxford/BBC English and some CNN idiot had not only subtitled it but at times got the subtitles wrong.
If viewers can't even work out BBC English what hope do they have with the mild regional accents in Dr Who or more importantly a visitor from another State?
In my opinion children should be exposed to different accents.
We need one universal incantation that would encompass all of phonemes of all human languages, taught to all youngest pupils all around the world. Once they accomplish reciting it flawlessly, they will be prepared to take on learning any foreign language later in life. However, since their teachers typically won't have good enough ears for all subtle differences in "exotic" languages, we need speaker-independent speech recognition software that can provide accurate feedback.
A young person who hears the same speaker every day will soon understand that speaker perfectly, however weird their accent. So it really doesn't matter so much how teachers speak. Call centres are another matter: in that case you often have elderly callers with very little opportunity to get used to the accent.
WTF has concision or prolixity got to do with accent or place of origin?
You seem to be mistaking Avril Lavigne, who is known for such songs as Sk8r Boi and Complicated with Alanis Morissette, who is known for writing a song called Ironic, in which the only actual irony was that the song had nothing to do with irony.
It's ok... they're both Canadian. You're allowed to confuse us all. I do know Bob from Calgary, but he never mows his lawn and his igloo is in really bad repair.
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?
the proper response, unfortunately, is to demand that they repeat everything you can't understand, and when you become a nuisance, go to the dean, then when they do nothing which is typical, you go up to the next level of adminstration. Then when that bears no fruit, you get the other students in your class together, make up signs, and hold a protest.
It's YOUR education. Stand up for it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So this is that rarest of birds, the "programming hipster".
If you have an accent and want to teach in an English based school then not only should you be monitored you should have to pass yearly tests to make sure your English is crystal clear. I had prof's who talked with strong accents and honestly going to class was a waste of time, they screwed up simple English and more then 1/2 the time I couldn't make them out. It's not a violation of anything, North America is an English speaking continent. Yes there are other languages but honestly every language should get it's own school and own teachers. Accents can make it near impossible to learn properly or to understand properly, it's a problem that needs a solution.
Teach Americans to speak and write proper English, like the rest of us. I'm sick of these barely comprehensible drawls they have, mispronouncing words and their crimes against spelling.
Dis program be blaytant descrim.... descriminimi... descrimanashun gainst we niggaz cuz da MAN want us talkin' like he do... keepin da niggaz DOWN!
Well it's not actually. I am staff, not a student. I'm in the customer service business, being computer support, so I try not to be a jerk. That said "Send us an e-mail," is one of our favorite phrases. Part of it is so we don't forget to do things, part of it is to have documentation, but part of it is people are often more intelligible in a written form.
The students I feel sorry for, because while what you say is right, it isn't what happens.
Beunas Tardes! Tank joo far colling Shitty Wok.
What makes him being "Vulcan" biologically impossible instead of highly unlikely?
There is not clear cut way to respond to this. Providing training to employees to improve their accent so more customers can understand them is a business practice, where not doing so could drive people away from that company. Monitoring teachers to see if their accent meets some vague 'requirement' for maintaining a teaching license is discrimination in its base form, especially as its use in Arizona is targetted at Mexican and South American accents. The first is perfectly acceptable, as the employee can always quit if they do not like it. The second is not.
If it has anything to do with regulating immigration or immigrants, it's automatically considered to be a violation of rights.
Well, that is if it's seen to affect Latino immigrants. They wouldn't give a damn about a school district telling a German immigrant with a heavy accent to change his speech so that the students can understand him.
Badish, Bavarian, very difficult.
But when I tell someone I can't understand, they usually switch to understandable high-German without missing a beat. They could just speak high-German all the time, but they get lazy, or they just prefer their localized accent for everyday speech.
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.
People forget that. We all discriminate. Clean water, dirty water; red meat, moldy meat; competent doctor, incompetent doctor. Beyond that it's tastes: music, food, looks, cars, computers.
At a basic level discrimination protects us by attempting to avoid things that are bad for us. Socially, varied discrimination gives us a much wider variety. It would be downright boring if we all liked and disliked the same things.
Yes, they are discriminating. They want teachers who their students can easily understand, thus facilitating the students' education. Teachers who do not fit that description should be discriminated against, just as I discriminate against moldy meat.
To send every teacher to a class would be a waste of resources and achieve nothing concrete but pissing off those fluent teachers forced to sit through the class.
I'm all for it.
I remember failing spelling tests in the 5th grade in Montgomery, Alabama, as I couldn't understand what the teacher was actually saying.
(Because she had an Alabama accent, and I had only spent time up 'til then from DC and northward on the east coast, or in Europe on military bases.)
Now, by the time you get to college, you need to start dealing with learning accents (although, I admit again, that there was a teacher whose class made much more sense once I figured out that 'mayored' was 'measured' and I was able to decode his accent), but there were some TAs (in engineering for the most part) that had difficulty understanding what the students were asking, and in teaching us as we couldn't understand them.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
By far, the largest immigrant population in Arizona is Latinos; thus, those who fail the test would logically be mostly Latino. That doesn't mean racist, that means they're immigrants who have too thick an accent.
People need to stop the racism claims until they can show unintelligible white German, Russian or even Scottish speakers who are not likewise told to to work on their accents.
It has absolutely nothing to do with travel, It has something to do with work only insofar as a person being qualified for said work. A reasonable qualification (e.g., students being able to understand you) should raise no civil rights issues.
If you think your teachers' accents are an issue, you make IELTS testing a job requirement and test all of the teachers. ALL of them. Not just the ones that you think look or sound foreign.
If they pass, hooray... they're fine for teaching even if they have a bit of an accent and you leave them alone.
If they fail, you arrange for them to take speech classes. If they consistently fail and/or refuse to take the classes to improve their speech, then you fire them. There's no discrimination in firing a teacher who can't do their job properly as long as you apply the same standard to all teachers.
How do you pronounce that?
You have a problem with assimilation? You're a Reconquista, right?
You think this former immigrant is anti-immigrant?Yes, I lived in a foreign country for a long time, I bothered to learn the language, I bothered to abide by the customs. I didn't complain when none of the official forms for regular internal stuff were in English. I didn't complain that stores and ads didn't have English versions. I realized I was in their country and had a duty to assimilate while there. And when I brought my wife back here, she assimilated to the US, doesn't even have a detectable foreign accent.
The oh-so enlightened Switzerland will even kick you out if you haven't learned German or French well enough after a few years. Good idea.
Ok, I was one of those third graders who moved from South America to Alexandria Virginia, fifty years ago, before they could even spell ESL. I got thrown in a class with everyone else, and it was up to me to figure out the language. I'm very grateful that the teachers were all native English speakers, and I seem to have done alright, keeping my Spanish accent-free, and able to speak English with no trace of a Spanish accent.
"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?"
If you're a company selling service for money, its an innovation. If you're a politically motivated race hustler lawyer or a liberal useful idiot, its a civil rights violation. One guy is making money, the other guy is -taking- money.
"I didn't. I dropped out of high school my sophomore year and had obtained my G.E.D before the year was over."
Sounds like someone has college degree envy.
"I'm smart, honest, I am! Look at me!!!"
In my US statistics graduate program, about 50% of students are Chinese, 17% are American, 17% are from other East Asian countries, and 17% are from elsewhere (roughly, but I've seen the country-of-origin list). The faculty has the same or greater Chinese skew. Many of the students come from other US programs (prior graduate study is required). I speak English and poor Spanish (took 4 years in grade school).
Many of my classes are taught partly in English and partly in Chinese; even if a Chinese-proficient professor mostly lectures in English, he/she will take and answer questions in Chinese. Most of the Chinese students who have completed degrees at other US institutions in a math/stat field can't speak English fluently, as they joined Chinese social clusters at their previous institution and are doing so again now.
At this point, I've learned not to expect that English will be the standard language of the academic world. I have no problem with that. However, a lot of the English speakers (including myself and many of ESL, non-Chinese students) are pushing for an enforceable language descriptor in course descriptions. I feel as though I made a poor decision in not finding out about the language before I came to this university, but there's no reason courses can't offer individual disclaimers about language so that students can pick accordingly.
As for the issue of public grade schools, it seems that 1) there is no official language of the US and there should be schools that offer instruction in different languages, though I don't know how that would work in a post-Brown v. Board world, and 2) that standardization of accents within a language seems reasonable only if it can be done in a non-discriminatory manner, but I don't think that's possible unless the evaluation relies on student performance, in which case why do we care about the accent issue when the question is student performance?
Ooh, guilty as charged. Although I tend to think of them both as posers first, and Canadians second.
Well, at least I didn't confuse Alanis with Celine Dion or Michael J. Fox.
#DeleteChrome
I think it's demonstrably stupid of you to assume that there are no intelligent beings on a planet of 40 Eridani, and that it's impossible for the OP to be one of those.
Of course, it's about as likely as, well, an alien from a planet used in a popular sci-fi series coming to earth and posting on Slashdot... But to say it's absolutely impossible is really quite ridiculous. Unless you've personally been to the 40 Eridani star system and can confirm none of the planets there have intelligent life, then you don't know. I doubt we've even discovered any exoplanets in that system yet, though they most probably do exist (the latest findings are showing that exoplanets are common in every star system, and that's with us only being able to detect really big ones at this point, as we can't yet detect ones as small as Earth).
Accents are a product of your first language. The fact that English is essentially a mash-up, a hybrid language, should exclude it from accentism.
Huh? Every language has accents, including English, and every language is a hybrid or mash-up of older languages. No language is pure, except perhaps Lojban (which isn't a natural language anyway).
French is a mash-up of Latin and some other tribal languages, and wouldn't exist in its present form if it weren't for Latin and the influence of the Roman Empire. The thing that's so remarkable about English is that it's a mash-up of (older forms of) German and French (and by extension, Latin and Greek). As far as Indo-European languages go, Germanic and Romance languages are rather different, so a mash-up of the two is rather odd in some ways.
French is just a cobbled together language too. If you want to see a "real" old-world language, go visit your Basque neighbors in the south of France and listen to them speak. That language is much older than your French.
but forgive me if I assume the USA has no "official language"
The Constitution of this country is written in English. All acts of Congress and all regulations of the executive branch are written in English. That's as official as I need.
What fact? English is neither a creole nor a pidgin. It is a Germanic language at its core syntactically, phonologically, and in its vocabulary. It still shares much in common with its past forms (including Old English a.k.a. Anglo-Saxon) and other Germanic languages (Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, etc). Yes, it has many words of French and Latin origin but so do most "real Old World" languages. It has also acquired quite a few other words from various languages as appropriate for any language with an imperial legacy and diverse peoples taking it up. Further reading: History of the English Language.
You sound awfully upset about English's high standing in the world. A rather small thing to get so worked up over.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Speaking a second (what used to be your first) language at home or among friends is fine. But do not expect the natives to learn your ways. The natives expect you to learn their ways, and you're in their country. Then the natives will pick and choose what they like about your culture and integrate it into the culture overall. In the case of the Cubans, I love the inclusion of picadillo into our larger cuisine (Mexican and Puerto Rican picadillo, not so much).
Where we was goin to school at, we could of definately used some accent neutralization. I ain't never gon' ferget my English teacher who knowed how to talk real good, and teached us good to. Or my biology teacher who teached us all about Armageddon, which for which'uns of y'all is ignerint is pronounced ar-MEG-gadon.
It shore was depressin where I growed up at.
When I worked for a school I insisted on email because lots of the time they weren't supposed to have what they were asking for. "I can't do it without an email" is an awesome tool.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
His argument is less stupid than your reason for dismissing it. You can substitute Vulcan for any non-english speaking nationality if it makes you feel better, but it wouldn't change the argument.