Teaching in English

Just read nilsinelabore's posting of the article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Teach Impediment--When the student can't understand the instructor, who is to blame?" by John Gravois.

The core of the article (which should be read in full anyway) is roughly this--American student complains that non-American Professors and graduate teaching assistants speak with a funny accent and is thus incomprehensible. The linguists weigh in and wonders if they should just listen more carefully:

In 1988 Donald L. Rubin, a professor of education and speech communication at the University of Georgia, began toying with an experimental model that would occupy him for the next several years: He gathered American undergraduates inside a classroom and then played a taped lecture for them over high-fidelity speakers. The lecture -- an introduction to the Mahabharata, say, or a discourse on the growing scarcity of helium -- was delivered in the voice of a man from central Ohio.

While the undergraduates sat and listened, they faced an image projected onto the classroom wall in front of them: Half the time, it was a photograph of an American man ("John Smith from Portland"), standing at a chalkboard and staring back at them. For the other half of the testing groups, the slide projected before them was that of an Asian man ("Li Wenshu from Beijing"), standing at the same chalkboard. The two figures were dressed, posed, and groomed as similarly as possible.

Now for the interesting part: When the students were asked to fill in missing words from a printed transcript of the central Ohioan's taped speech, they made 20 percent more errors when staring at the Asian man's image than they did when staring at the picture of "John Smith."

What did that mean?

"Students who expect that nonnative instructors will be poor instructors and unintelligible speakers can listen to what we know to be the most standard English speech and the most well-formed lecture, and yet experience some difficulties in comprehension," Mr. Rubin says. "All the pronunciation improvement in the world," he says, "will not by itself halt the problem of students' dropping classes or complaining about their instructors' language."

I'll leave the reader to ponder the significance of this most interesting experiment on his or her own. Let me change the subject a little.

The above brings to mind my own experiences in UC Berkeley. In my first year there as a graduate student, I learned that some of my professors and classmates understand me better when I speak more slowly and make a conscious effort to enunciate. In other words, for the sake of communication, I would have to do more than would have been sufficient in Singapore.

I started work as a Graduate Student Instructor only in my second year (standard department policy), and once again, I learned not to take for granted that my students would, as a matter of course, understand me without effort on my part.

At the beginning of each semester when faced with a new class, I would introduce myself, etc. And each time, I would half-jokingly (but also half-seriously) tell the students that just as my name "in English" is a colonial Anglicization of a Chinese name rendered in a southern dialect (Hainanese) as spoken in Southeast Asia, so likewise my spoken English has many background influences. Therefore, I will make an effort to speak slow and clear, and it's your responsibility to stop me and make me say it again if I am not comprehended.

And to be doubly sure--I make it a point to punctuate my section discussions (or "tutorials", as they are called in NUS) with questions that are aimed at testing the student's comprehension of what I said. I learn to study their faces and body language to help in determining if they really understood. (In fact, I attend the lectures mainly to observe the student's reactions to the professor's presentation, taking note of the specific points that seem to confuse them.)

From experience, the student's in-class feedback--by way of their own questions, or by way of how they answer my questions--is absolutely the most critical element. A 'right answer' need not imply perfect comprehension, but 'wrong answers' often speak volumes about just exactly what is it that the student does not grasp. Most of the time (but not all), it is not the language (i.e., English) or the accent that stands in the way of effective communication in class as it is about the instructor taking active steps to secure the students' understanding beyond telling them such and such. And that is the hardest even if most rewarding thing to do, something that I only became more more confident of over years of practice.

Berkeley students are especially conscientious about their post-semester feedback forms. I'm glad to note that I can only recall one student leaving the comment:"Mr. Loy speaks with an accent and it was a bit hard for me to understand in the beginning..." (or something like it). As far as I can tell, the students and I got along fine (search for "Loy" on this page).