Road block

An excerpt from an article that caught my eye this past weekend ("US students confounded by teachers' poor English," ST, June 25):

Miss Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness.

After fetting a C on a laboratory report in an introductory chemistry course, the freshman went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done to get a better grade.

The assistant, a graduate student from China, had a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Miss Serrin what her report had lacked.

"He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy'," said Miss Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. "But it wasn't easy. He was brilliant, but he couldn't communicate in English."

... With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the past two decades, undergraduates at large research universities in the United States often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 per cent of graduate students are foreign-born; and math and the physical sciences, where 41 per cent of graduate students are from overseas...

[...]

In January, Ms Bette Grande, a Republican state representative from Fargo, North Dakota, introduced legislation that would allow students in state universities to drop courses without penalty and be reimbursed if they could not understand the spoken English of a teaching assistant or a professor.

"If a student has paid tuition to be in that classroom," Ms Grande said, "he should receive what he paid for."

While this article is in the context of the US, it parallels the situation even in local universities. And, yes, it is "particularly acute" in my area of study.

In recent semesters, the school has given lecturers and tutors the option to open an anonymous feedback feature, which allows for students to make suggestions, without the paranoia that any negative comments will impact their grade in that module. However, as is always the problem with lack of accountability, it's hard to stamp out abuse.

We had a lecturer from Hong Kong a while back, and after he set a remarkably difficult mid-term test, he drew a whole flurry of criticism, which he chose to publish for all to see. In what I thought was the worst(s) of the lot, some students hit out at his accent, which they claim was incomprehensible (in words that were much harsher than I'm used to).

I've sat through lessons by teachers from Belgium, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Mauritius, the Philippines, Taiwan, the UK, the US -- and of course -- Hong Kong; just at the top of my head. Do some of their accents take getting used to? Sure. Are they to be begrudged for that? Do I even want to answer this question? (Someone from China once told me that when Singaporeans speak Singlish, it's difficult to even make out which parts are in English, Chinese, Malay, Hokkien... you get the idea.)

I think there is something wrong with the objectives of higher-level education if we are going to give money-back guarantees. We can try to insulate ourselves from the rest of the world, but the truth is that many of us are going to have to deal with people from other countries, other cultures, where their primary language is not the same as ours -- if not now, then in the near future.

If we can put aside the self-centredness for a moment to pull the sticks out of our asses, we might just find this a valuable part of the learning process.

That being said, there are certain expectations that I feel the school has to live up to, which they really haven't. The reason why we lament at sub-standard teaching is not so much that we expect all our teachers to be exceptional at their job; we just want them to make a tangible effort -- to see their participation as instrumental to our education, and not just as part of their job requirement. If part of that effort is to master a second language, then the least we can do is try to suck it up and get used to the various accents; I can't believe that adapting to any accent is worse than deciphering rap, and people still manage to do that.

It is a two-way street where the arrows on the ground have faded, and no one is directing traffic; everyone is just stuck, hanging around, cursing and swearing, but making no headway. There has emerged an unfortunate cycle of mistrust between teachers and learners, and this is what has us picking on every irrelevant detail, and has them jaded and uninspired. That, to me, is a worse thing than any language barrier.