This actually caused somewhat of a stir in my last year as an undergrad.
Student organizations were bringing up the point that while students may not graduate without having completed the “English Profficiency Exam,” there are no requirements for professorrs to take an English Profficency Exam in order to teach.
At a university with a huuuuge math and engineering departments, we’d get brilliant professors from all over the world (sometimes they were just “visiting faculty”, but students would come to class to find out they’d shelled out their tuition fees to sit for two hours every week to listen to an utterly incomprehensible session. Not just tough accents, but basic grammar and syntax could be out the window too.
So great, your professor is a genius, but you don’t benefit from his/her knowledge – you and your peers had to teach yourself the material with TAs in study groups.
I don’t know what came of it. It was a hot topic in the student newspaper just about the time that I was done school.
Former Formula One driver Gerhard Berger of Austria on more than one occasion complained about “problems with the chickens” after a less than fortunate practice or qualifying session.
The undergraduate newspaper at my university recently had an editorial about this, specifically in relation to the sciences and the engineering department. But they were complaining that the main problem was actually with the grad student TAs, many of whom are from south and east Asia.
I thought the funniest thing was when the writer complained about the TAs not being able to communicate properly in the English language. Plenty of the undergrad papers that i graded last semester had a similar problem, and those students can’t use the excuse of having English as a second language.
I’ve having that problem this very instant! No less than 3 of my lecturers at the moment are Indian. I’ve got no problem with Indians, I’ve got friends who are Indians, but goddamn, it, if you’re going to teach classes where new terminology is introduced to the students loose the f***ing accent!
And yes irrational number surds. I’ve never heard them called surds since but the class was being taught in Papua New Guinea on a Britishish curriculum.
There was a big stink in late 90s at my college about professors and TAs who’s English skills were sub-par.
I remember one newspaper columnist who wrote an infuriatingly stupid column about how since he learned fables and crap like that from his heavily-accented grandfather, the students were all a bunch of idiots.
He didn’t seem to realize there’s a slight difference between learning about how teaching a man to fish feeds him for life, and trying to learn how to do complex engineering differential equations.
It’s been 15 years, and it still pisses me off. And I mostly had native English speaking professors while studying CS, it was my EE friends who had it really bad.
Reminds me of a friend of mine, who had emigrated to the U.S. from Russia some 12 years before we re-met each other in grad school. He spoke excellent, although rather accented English, and got one of the very few coveted T.A. slots in Russian history. (If you’re studying Russian history, you’d better get used to Russian accents anyway.) His students never had any problems with him, and he also got along just fine in upper-level grad seminars conducted in English (I had a class with him; I was in a different program, but there was some overlap).
He decided to stop after his M.A. and not go on for the Ph.D., and when his M.A. diploma hadn’t shown up nearly a year later, he called the registrar’s office to see what was going on. Apparently they had never issued his diploma because he’d never taken the spoken ESL proficiency test required for all grad students whose undergrad education was in a non-English-speaking country, which nobody had ever told him he had to take. Apparently he was also supposed to take another spoken English exam in order to serve as a T.A., which nobody had ever told him about, either.
Given that he’d become a naturalized U.S. citizen, completed a fair amount of grad coursework in another field at another U.S. university, and passed the TOEFL, all of which require spoken English proficiency, before he’d even been admitted to the Russian History program, I though the requirement was overkill. But if you’re going to make someone take a test in order to graduate, you’d think it would be good to let him know, no? Fortunately they had the sense to just issue his diploma without making him schlep back to campus and take the exam.
I have encountered, on more than one occasion, a clerk who will pronounce the dollar sign in the price. That threw me off completely the first time I heard that. “That’ll be a dollar two-thirty-nine.” The price showing on the register was $2.39. I think I did a triple-take before understanding what I was supposed to pay.
The commencement speaker at my college graduation was the president of our sister university – Anwei Normal University in China. (I might be misspelling the name; it’s been 16 years.) He spoke no English. His translator spoke broken English. As excruciating as most commencement speeches are, this one was worse; we had no idea what points he was making, and had no way to judge how much longer he would speak.
At my tutoring job, there is a little Indian girl whom I often assist when she is reading difficult passages (she is a pretty impressive reader for still being in Kindergarten, BTW). One frustrating part of it, though, is she does not pronounce the ‘th’ sound properly, so the word ‘the’ is pronounced ‘tuh’ and I’ve tried explaining to her that when you see a ‘t’ and an ‘h’ together, you’re suppose to make a thhhh sound, but she always objects saying, “tat’s not what my teacher says you’re taposed to do!”.
As I am just a lowly tutor, and not a speech therapist/ESL person, I’ve kind of given up on the matter because she is a really bright girl and I don’t want to get her all frustrated just because she isn’t pronouncing ‘the’ correctly. Still, I feel it would be easier for her to fix the misprononciation now before it is deeply set in her mind and other kids tease her about the way she talks
Isn’t that exactly what they’re doing? “Loosing” their accent?
I once looked on with great amusment as a Scottish gentleman from the town of Stirling tried to explain to an American where he was from.
Scotsman: I come from Stirling. (Of course, with his Glaswegian accent, this came out as Ai kem frrrom Stairrrling). American: “Starling”? S: Noh, Stairrrling. A: Starling? S: Stairrrling. Wi’ an eye. A: An ‘A’?
I was calling bus companies trying to find out how to get from Sacramento to San Francisco airport, as my friends couldn’t take me. I find the only place that did that route and barely managed to understand the guy on the other end of the phone. I managed to find out the cost and route, then asked where to buy the ticket. He says with a very strong Southern accent “Maam that’s 5th and Ayell street”, so I ask “How do you spell Ayell?”, there is a long pause, then the guy says really dumbfounded “Maam, that’s capital Ayell.” Friend was rolling on the floor laughing.
I donno, I’m finding that trying to understand my ESL teachers and TAs forces me to learn things better by having to ask questions, pay attention, and rephrase things into correct grammar in my own head just to make sure I know what the hell’s going on. More work, yes, but I’m sure I’d fall asleep otherwise.
And it always seems to be the same letters. I’ve had lectures when the lecturer pronounces AND writes the same, AND uses almost interchangably, ‘n’ and ‘m’.
There’s a type of variable in C called a “static” variable. Friend of mine was in a programming class taught by a Spanish gentleman who pronounced the term “estatic.” Most of the class dutifully wrote down “ecstatic.” My friend, who had already read the book, knew the correct term; we amused ourselves for a time pondering what the opposite of an ecstatic variable would be. A morose variable, perhaps?
Now you guys have reminded me of a funny episode of Judge Judy I once saw. The plaintiff was arguing her case, and explained that she “went to the seek-a-see”. So Judge Judy asks her to repeat what she said, and she again says, “I went to the seek-a-see”. Judge Judy finally figured out that she had gone to Circuit City.
