Slashdot Mirror
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.
in the US its a civil rights issue
www.RacquetUp.org - Helping Detroit Youth
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.
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..."
No, it's a stupid idea, no matter who thought of it. Look, I grew up in Texas and Florida. One of my English teachers had such a thick Southern drawl that even for 'native' speakers it was sometimes a bit hard to figure out what she was saying. I survived. So, I imagine, did everyone else. I even survived learning Russian from a teacher with a pronounced Mexican accent.
It's just racism, plain and simple.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
It's embarrassing for the teacher, and embarrassing for the students.
I took a chem class in college where the professor was just horrible at teaching. I don't know if he just didn't give a damn, or if he was just a really bad teacher who did really good grant work, who knows. Either way, it was well known that you basically had to bring a list of "what the fuck was he talking about" topics to your discussion classes to ask the TAs to explain. I had a brilliant TA who who was saddled with the thickest indian accent I've encountered in my entire life. We'd ask him to explain a topic, and he'd explain, and none of us would understand his accent, we'd sheepishly ask him to repeat again, and he'd just speak louder.
I actually talked to a bunch of the other students about it after class, and we were all releaved to find out we were experiencing the same problem. none of us could understand the guy. We all agreed that when we could cut through the accent, we thought he was much better at explaining the concepts than the teacher, and he certainly knew what he was talking about, but at least half the time it was almost like he wasn't speaking the same language as us.
Now, that's just a single TA in a class that had A. the professor, and B. other TAs to ask questions to. If this was a single teacher instructing the class, and that person was all the class had to turn to for explanation of the topic, say what you want... a lot of people are going to fail that class who otherwise shouldn't have.
I'm not sure how widespread a problem it is, since I only encountered it once in my life, but "people's feelings" be damned, it WAS a problem.
"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.
I prefer learning a language from a native speaker (but we don't all have that luxury) however being critical of how someone speaks is not racism. People who cannot speak clearly are in teaching positions where clarity matters, surprisingly someone has an issue with this, story at 11.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
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.
Time is all that's needed. My grandmother called my mom her "little anchor baby" (in Spanish of course). My mother speaks decent English despite the fact that her mom only wanted to teach her Spanish. There wasn't a way around learning English when you're surrounded by it daily. The long and short of it is this: I'm a second generation American, speak abysmal Spanish, and despite my olive skin am as much of a Star Wars loving George Lucas hatin' gringo as the rest of you. Just give it a few generations and we'll be complaining about those damned Englishmen who take all of the jobs and refuse to learn English.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
"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?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
It's simple, everyone goes to the class until they pass it. If a teacher already has a clear accent, they immediately pass and don't have to go back.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
It depends on the people you select to be critical of. If they are all African-American or Hispanic, while the teacher from Glasgow gets off scott free, then yes, it probably is racism.
BZZZT! I'm sorry, that's incorrect!
If the Democrats did it, The Republicans would say it's a leftist nanny state plot to interfere in our lives and destroy American individualism.
If If the Republicans did it, the Democrats would call it a xenophobic fascist conformism.
Either way, the Libertarians would insist that if the kids want an education, they can go work in the copper mines and hire a private tutor on their own time. The free market will fix it, it fixes everything.
According to the Tea party, nobody should do it, they're taxing me, we gotta quit taxing people and handing out these accent subsidies! Now where's my damned medicare check?
Thank you for playing KNOW YOUR POLITICAL MEME!
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?
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.
"So if it's good enough for Berkeley or Harvard, why is it not good enough for an elementary school in Phoenix?"
Well, perhaps because those students do not have fully developed language skills, and many of them may be of more modest intelligence. That someone who has completely primary education, and tested highly can understand something doesn't mean a child who is still being taught can do so nearly as well. Someone going to Harvard has completed most of the English education, their principal mental development, and is likely a standard deviation above the mean or more in intelligence. You cannot compare them to an elementary student, particularly one who might be learning disabled.
Also please consider that there isn't "an" English accent, there are different ones based on the native language of the speaker. It is also much harder for a non-native speaker with one accent to understand a non-native speaker with another. So if you have a teacher with a strong accent who is different form the ESL children in their class, that is an additional barrier to those children.
It can also be pretty bad, perhaps you've not been to a campus with a large number of foreign students but I happen to work on one in a department that has that. I can go on for days with stories of the various problems language barriers have caused but the one most relevant to education:
Our student workers are frequently undergraduate students in our department. Makes sense. One of them was complaining because his TA kept marking down his homework because the TA didn't understand what he was saying. I had a look and confirmed this. The TA was grading his English, taking away points for words the TA believed were incorrect. However in every case the word was a real word, was spelled correct, and was used properly in the sentence. The problem was the TA's English skills were poor, whereas our student's English skills were extremely good.
Unfortunately I could not convince our student to appeal this to the department and attempt to get the TA slapped down. In his case, no real harm done. He got As anyhow since he was a very smart individual and he knew his TA to be incorrect. However consider this with, say, a student who is foreign but speaks a different primary language from the TA, who is being given incorrect instruction or, more relevant to this story, a child who's language skills are still under development.
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 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
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.
It's not "good enough" when college students can't understand their instructors. It's a serious problem and a slap in the face to students. It's bad enough when the student is an adult and paying for instruction. At least college students can (ostensibly) stand up for themselves and demand better. Allowing small children to be subjected to teachers they can't understand is a travesty. The public school teachers of this country seem to think that the education system exists primarily to provide them with jobs. The fact that maybe some kids will learn...or not...is a complete afterthought. Reason #1006 why this country is doomed.
BTW, way to play the race bias card. I'd love to see YOUR KID stuck with teachers he can't understand. I wonder if you'd still think it is all about race then.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
It's just racism, plain and simple.
The hell it is. You are blatantly misusing the word "race" which is wholly independent of linguistics. A black person in the UK has a completely different accent than one in Harlem than one in Haiti. "Racism" indeed.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
From My Cousin Vinny
Vinny Gambini: It is possible that the two yutes...
Judge Chamberlain Haller: ...Ah, the two what? Uh... uh, what was that word?
Vinny Gambini: Uh... what word?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Two what?
Vinny Gambini: What?
Judge Chamberlain Haller: Uh... did you say 'yutes'?
Vinny Gambini: Yeah, two yutes.
Judge Chamberlain Haller: What is a yute?
Vinny Gambini: [beat] Oh, excuse me, your honor...
[exaggerated]
Vinny Gambini: Two YOUTHS.
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?
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!"
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 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.
No, it's a stupid idea, no matter who thought of it. Look, I grew up in Texas and Florida. one of my English teachers was dumb as a post, so much so that she just told blonde jokes instead of teaching. I survived. So, I imagine, did everyone else. I even survived learning math from one teacher who couldn't add fractions, nor answer any questions about geometry.
It's just racism, plain and simple.
Incompetence is incompetence. If, as a teacher, something about you makes it difficult to learn, then you are a poor teacher. People who are poor at their jobs should either work to improve their performance or find something they are good at.
Yeah, you can say that, and you're technically correct, but your actual point is simply wrong. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was put in place by a Democratic administration with the overwhelming support of the Republican party over the screaming objections of a significant minority of the Democratic party. The reality is that the vote in Congress was strictly North vs South. It had nothing to do with political party membership (as another replier to your post has pointed out). At that time the Republican Party was the party of the North, the Democrats of the South and North. The Southern Democrats left the Democratic Party because of that law, and joined the Republican party, took over it from the pre-1964 Republicans, and made it the monstrosity it is today.
So yes, the Democrats passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because there were so many of them that the Republicans were irrelevant to the vote (you'll notice from one of your other repliers that there were 67 Democrats in the Senate and just shy of 50 voted for the act, but the Republicans voted yes by a larger margin--their votes just didn't matter as much because they were such a minority party). The Democrats did NOT pass the act over the objections of Republicans, they passed it over the objections of other Democrats.
In short, talking about the pre-1968 parties (the shift began in 1964, continued in 1968, and was more or less finalized by the election of 1972) as if they were the same parties as today is moronic.
Republicans, you mean the same ones that want to roll back various civil rights legislation and voting protections?
You mean the ones that voted for the Civil Rights act of 1964?
Fine, say "Social Conservatives" instead. They may have had a different label 50 years ago, but they're the same assholes.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
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.