Thread: Sometimes, Learning Can Get Lost in Translation-US Students

Sometimes, learning can get lost in the translation

Foreign teachers' speech can be hard to understand

By Lou Michel
News Staff Reporter
Updated: October 19, 2009, 8:44 AM / 23 comments

Patrick Flatley was eager to study math when he enrolled at the University at Buffalo.

But he says he encountered an unexpected obstacle that had nothing to do with complex formulas.

The Elma resident could not figure out what his math instructor was saying — because of the teacher's heavy foreign accent.

"I couldn't understand the teacher, so I dropped the course before the first exam so I wouldn't be penalized," Flatley said. "It was very upsetting."

A year later, the 19-year-old, who aspires to become an accountant, says he is taking the same calculus and statistics course and getting high marks.

"I have a teacher with a New York City accent, and I have an "A' so far," Flatley said. "Don't tell me there aren't teachers out there who can't speak English."

Flatley's situation illustrates a language barrier that sometimes occurs at UB, which welcomes students and instructors from all over the world.

But the global perspective comes at a price for some students who struggle to understand international professors and teaching assistants whose accents, pronunciation and, in some cases, misuse of words result in knowledge getting lost in the translation.

UB officials take issue with the criticism, saying they receive very few complaints.

By design, they say, the university is a melting pot intended to expose students to some of the brightest minds in the world.

"It is our intention to internationalize the campus. In their future careers, students will have to interact with people from all over the world and be able to understand their background and even their accents," said John T. Ho, interim vice provost for graduate education.

Attracting high-caliber educators from around the world, Ho added, benefits the United States economically and competitively, noting that several of the 2009 American recipients of the Nobel prizes in medicine, physics and chemistry were immigrants.

But inside the classrooms and lecture halls, students told The Buffalo News, they face linguistic challenges.

"If you're in a lecture hall with 300 people and you're not sitting up close, it's hard to understand," said Tony Scrace, a senior from Lockport majoring in international business and world trade. "I have two international teachers, one is from Haiti and the other is Asian. They speak broken English. The words are not the same and sometimes their presentations have grammatical errors in them."

The language barrier in higher education goes well beyond UB.

Other universities and colleges find it necessary to turn to the global labor pool because Americans with advanced degrees often seek better paying jobs in private industry rather than education, according to a spokesman for the American Association of University Professors in Washington, D.C.

"The fundamental problem is continued underfunding and defunding of higher education at a time when there are critical needs in science and engineering and increasing numbers of students," said Martin D. Snyder, whose organization represents 48,000 university and college professors and academic professionals.

In addition, prior to entering college, students are not pushed in the direction of complex technical fields, Snyder said.

"The American education system does such a poor job of encouraging students from elementary school on to pursue careers in science; and those who do, prefer to work in industry where the compensation is much, much higher," he said.

As a result, he said, universities have long grappled for long periods with complaints that faculty who speak English as a second language sometimes have difficulty communicating.

UB officials say they have made substantial progress in this area, carefully vetting prospective professors and limiting the duties of international graduate teaching assistants who lack a solid command of the English language.

For more than two decades, classes have been provided at UB for teaching assistants who need to improve their language skills, according to Keith E. Otto, who heads UB's English-as-a-second-language program, one of the first in the country.

Those unable to clearly speak English, Otto said, are given duties outside the classroom, such as grading papers.

When international professors seek employment at UB, the interview process lasts several days and the candidate meets with a number of people, according to John J. Wood, associate vice provost for international education.

"They give teaching demonstrations, which goes not only to the mastery of their material, but how well they present it, and English is a factor," Wood said.

Mohan's experiences

Satish Mohan, the Amherst town supervisor who plans to return to his post as a professor in UB's Engineering Department in January, says he is not without sympathy for students who say they have difficulty understanding what's being taught.

A native of India, he said he has encountered international educators at UB who have struggled with their English.

In a diplomatic way, Mohan said he would sometimes share with them his story of improving his own diction.

"When the students would ask me questions, I immediately wrote down that perhaps this sentence or word was not clear. Then what I did, I chose an ideal English speaker and that was Peter Jennings. I listened to Peter Jennings all the time and then repeated after him," Mohan said of the late ABC News anchorman.

Mohan explained that he realized he had an obligation to not only have mastery of the subject he was imparting to students, but that it had to be delivered in a clear and understandable manner.

If students complained about his English, he said he never took it personally.

"I did not take it as an attack on myself that my speech is not like what students hear or speak. But since my job was to teach them, one of my first initial efforts was to speak the way they understand," he said.

Mohan is not alone in recognizing that difficulties exist in getting concepts across when there is a language barrier.

"There is a loss, I will admit that," said Qi Dong, a UB economics doctoral student from China who works as a teaching assistant. "For me, some questions are very abrupt, and I'm not perfectly prepared for that."

Aaron Hargrave, a UB nuclear medicine technology graduate, said teaching assistants are often responsible for helping students grasp complicated information.

"You go to professors to hear the lectures, the big overall ideas, and you go to the TAs to get down to the nitty-gritty. You ask them your specific questions and you take your quizzes with them," said Hargrave, of Lewiston.

But when a student struggles to comprehend what the teaching assistant is saying, he said, it compounds an already challenging situation.

Teaching assistants, Dong says, have an obligation to thoroughly familiarize themselves with course material in order to get the main points across to students who seek their help.

"I do think that 80 to 90 percent of the information can be transferred," he said, adding that students should make use of office hours and study groups to succeed.

Some students, however, said that as the semester progresses, they develop an ear for the accent, though it is difficult initially.

American-born students, Snyder added, need to embrace diverse education environments, if they want to be successful.

"Even though the students sometimes deny it, they are resistant to someone from a different culture, someone from a different educational background," Snyder said. "They are so narrow and parochial that they can't open up to that person."

Spinoff benefits

Scrace, the international business student, says non-American professors do enrich course material.

"They bring a lot to the table in respect to business aspects from other parts of the world. Some have worked for years outside the United States and travel two or three times or more a year," he said. "They definitely know what is going on in their home regions."

An unintended benefit, Snyder says, is that students who seek each other's help in study groups often do better than those who go it alone.

"The fact is in any class, even one taught by the most accomplished speaker of English, students who work together in groups are always going to get better results.

"Part of that is they're taking the initiative to learn, they're taking responsibility for their education. They are talking to one another, raising and answering questions which might not be obvious things for the teacher to bring up in class," Snyder said.

But if language barriers become unreasonable, he said, students should speak with their faculty adviser or dean.

Ernesto J. Alvarado, acting president of UB's undergraduate Student Association, says he is aware of the language difficulties but says there is no question the university's professors are top notch in their academic fields.

"I think the university does a great job at hiring professors based on their understanding of whatever subject they are teaching," Alvarado said.

Providing another perspective, UB engineering student Robert G. Urtel questioned why he has to pay tuition if he is expected to teach himself when a professor can't speak English clearly.

"It makes me feel like I'm being personally cheated out of my tuition money," said Urtel, a junior. "You have to read the book, try and learn it on your own and work with other students going through the same thing."

lmichel@buffnews.com

http://www.buffalonews.com/cityregion/s ... 2091.html#

There was a discussion this morning on MSNBC (Morning Meeting) that 4th grade students in this country were rated below those in Kazakhstan in math and science skills, and that only 40 percent of today's high school graduates are on the college English level.
Rather than our schools catering to the non-English speakers, there are probably quite a few youngsters that do not understand the teachers they have in the lower grades, and those in college having to listen to lecturers with rough accents they don't understand is a waste of their tuition money.
One woman asked how long she had been in this country answered "Dorty-dree years."