From time to time, I hear students ask questions like, “Why don’t universities hire instructors who can speak English?” It’s usually a complaint about professors who have “foreign accents.”
Hereˆs one from Quora, with some more at the bottom of the post: “Does it make sense to hire Chinese professors in US universities when they can’t even speak basic English?” The “basic English” comments sounds contemptuous.
Okay, let’s acknowledge that everyone has an accent. And that it’s very difficult to separate complaints about accents from racist attitudes.
That said, there can be obstacles to communication between a professor and students.
I once saw video of Stephen Hawking teaching – after his motor disease was fairly advanced but before he got his voice synthesizer. He could speak, but not loudly and not with full fluency.
Hawking had an assistant (maybe a graduate student?) who was familiar with how Hawking spoke who relayed what he said. Some students did not need this. You could tell because some students would laugh at a joke before Hawkins’s assistant spoke.
You can hear Hawking in 1977 – when he was still able to talk – in this YouTube clip. It’s is comparable to the clip I saw.
I think the answer is universal design.
Instructors should think about how to design their course so anyone could take it. Like, say, a deaf student. What would you do? Use close captioning, video recordings with subtitles, transcripts, detailed notes.
Similarly, there are many reasons a student might not comprehend speech. If you couldn’t hear because of an ear infection, you probably wouldn’t start by complaining that the university made a hiring mistake. You would ask for repetition and clarification.As usual, these would not just make the course accessible to people with hearing impairments, but would make things better for everyone. It gives everyone ore opportunities to interact with the course material.
These design and communication decisions also addresses issues around accent mismatch. Any student still complaining is probably just being a jerk.
External links
Does it make sense to hire Chinese professors in US universities when they can't even speak basic English?
Why do colleges hire professors who are extremely difficult to understand and sometimes are unintelligible?
Why do colleges hire so many professors with such heavy accents you cannot comprehend them?
How can students cope with professors that lecture in thick accents?
3 comments:
"Instructors should think about how to design their course so anyone could take it. Like, say, a deaf student. What would you do? Use close captioning, video recordings with subtitles, transcripts, detailed notes."
Lovely idea, but let's at least acknowledge that this is a butt-ton of extra work. What should people prioritise it ahead of? In other words, what should they NOT do, that they're doing now, to free up the time for the close-captioning, subtitling and detailed notes?
For in person classes, if someone has an accent that's an obstacle to students learning, what's the solution? Hire someone to repeat everything, but in a more understandable way?
I think the "have instructors who speak English" issue is also a lot to do with students lack of experience with diversity. And most of the time, I have noticed that the students who claim they cannot understand a professor's accent are actually just being jerks. That aside, I do agree with the goal of universal design. And as for the commenter on the fact that closed-captioning, transcripts etc are more work. I agree, but that is where the importance of technology comes in. There are many softwares that now do this for you without it actually being extra work. And if we all implement universal design it really pushes for hybrid courses/flipped classrooms and with that we could cut down on work by reusing our recorded materials.
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