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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?"
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.
"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.
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.
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?
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.