Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed a controversial law against illegal immigration. One repercussion of this law is that the state education department has decided to move around teachers who speak accented English. The officials in the state education department claim that teachers whose spoken English is heavily accented or ungrammatical should be removed from classes where students are still learning English in order to provide better instruction for ESL learners. Ironically, in the 1990s, Arizona sought bilingual teachers for its bilingual-education program and actually recruited teachers from Latin America. With today’s rising anti-immigrant sentiment, the feelings towards bilingual education in Arizona have changed.
First, I do not believe that the law is indicative of the wants of the students and their families. As indicated by the statistics provided in the WSJ article, 46% of kindergarten to second-grade students are ESL learners. Some of those students come from homes that wish to preserve the native tongue, a trend that we have discussed in depth in class. Those families might want their kids to keep their accents (and their heritage).
Second, I wholeheartedly agree with Luis Tavarez, who claimed that: “It doesn’t matter to me what the accent is; what matters is if my children are learning.” As indicated in the statistics, by high school, only 14% of the students are ESL learners. Eventually, as immigrants spend more time in the United States, they learn English. Furthermore, the argument that non-accented teachers should be placed in ESL teachers because they have better grammar is not supported by my observations. I had many teachers in Brooklyn who were native-born but did not use proper grammar. Student achievement should be the measure of success of ESL classes, not whether or not the students have un-accented English.
Third, teachers with accents might actually benefit students who are learning a second-language. According to a recently released Israeli study – from the University of Haifa – students who are learning a second-language benefit from instruction by a teacher with the same accent that they have. The reason for this pattern is that students need to concentrate a lot more to understand English in a different accent than the one they are used to. I see this apply to my own family; my mom can fully understand Russians who speak English but cannot understand Dominicans who speak English. In addition to requiring a lesser degree of concentration to learn a new subject, teachers with accents due to their origin might better understand the cultures of the students and thus be able to relate to them. Such a connection is surely critical to a student’s feeling comfortable in the classroom.
Personally, as both an immigrant and a former ESL-student, I find the language debate in Arizona ridiculous. Accents are natural; everyone has an accent. To start filtering people based on their accents is a drastic step; what next – refuse to hire workers who are capable but have an accent? Yet that already happens…
I think that achievement and skills should be the basis of hiring decisions, not accent or background. This notion is already backed by anti-discrimination laws, so why is it so hard to enforce? I would love to discuss this further in class.
Article: Arizona Grades Teachers on Fluency
Article: Accented teachers may be better for English language learners: stud
Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/learning/accented-teachers-may-be-bette.html
Article: Putting the “accent” on language perception
Source: http://www.israel21c.org/201003077751/culture/putting-the-accent-on-language-perception
I wrote about the same topic Yuliya. What I find most interesting about the directive is, as you described, its focus on teachers' accents. Because of the historically (and continued) large immigration to the US, the notion of a proper American accent seems arbitrary. I'd be interested to learn more about how what we now consider American accents have been shaped by immigrants who spoke English as a second language.
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