You may have heard that Arizona's state Department of Education has ordered school districts to remove teachers whose English is "heavily accented or ungrammatical" from classes for students still learning English. The Linguistics Department of the University of Arizona has issued a letter pointing out that "such a policy undermines the effectiveness of the teaching and learning of English by non‐native speakers and may lead to additional harmful socioeconomic effects."
More below the fold.
I have already written a diary about the response of the president of University of Arizona to the show-me-your-papers law. My daughter is a grad student at Arizona and informed me of another move by the university to speak truth to xenophobic power.
Nineteen faculty members of the Linguistics Department sent a letter to the Department of Education (I'm sorry, I can't find it on the Web yet) arguing the following points:
- ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
- Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
- Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don't speak Spanish.
- Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
- It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
- There are many different 'accents' within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
- Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
- There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
The letter goes on to flesh out each of these arguments in detail and even offers academic citations for their arguments. (Hey, these are scholars!)
For example, to amplify on point #1, they write the following:
"This is one of the most robust findings that has emerged from every study we have done on intelligibility: intelligibility and accentedness are partially independent. In other words, it is possible to be completely intelligible and yet be perceived as having a heavy accent" (Derwing and Monroe 2009: 479).
Proficiency in the language of instruction, whether classes be targeted for English
language learners or native speakers, is obviously essential for a teacher. Clearly, no teacher should have an "accent" so marked that his or her students cannot understand him or her: but existing hiring and training practices are sufficient to mitigate this.
I find this a very heartening reminder of why my daughter chose University of Arizona for her master's degree program. While this state has been getting some bad press lately, and deservedly so, it's good to know that the university is an island of sanity amidst the xenophobic madness.