Parlez-Vous TA?

I don't know if this article has been making the rounds or not. I've been neglecting my blog reading lately.

I am very conflicted about the situation that it describes. I have seen and heard TAs that had a very limited command of the language and probably shouldn't have been selected to TA a course.

What I remember more clearly though, is a discussion section I had with an Italian TA a while back. Her English was impeccable – it seemed to me to be much stronger than most of the native speakers in the class, but she did have an accent.

Some of the students complained and tried to switch out of her class. Those that stayed either could understand her or needed the class and couldn’t get out. The class split into those two camps, and it made for a very difficult environment.

Obviously, I can’t say for sure why the students couldn’t understand her, but I got the impression that it was partially because they hadn’t ever really dealt with anyone with an accent (other than the watered down versions native to the US), and also perhaps because they just weren’t actively trying to understand. I could tell that the TA had become very frustrated. In the end, she implied that she had just chalked it up to the lousy US education system.

I hear that the problem is especially bad in the Engineering School. I’m assuming that the school selects grad students based on their ability to do research, and then they support them by giving them TA slots. If the best researcher is from South Asia and has a thick accent, should they be overlooked because their language isn’t ‘North American Standard’? Or to put it another way, should they be not selected simply because most of the undergrads in universities aren’t able to understand anything but ‘North American Standard.’

This gets into the nasty area of research vs. education which I don’t want to get into. On the language side though, I worry that this is just another way the US discourages international exchange. Obviously, being fluid (not necessarily fluent) in English should be a prerequisite for TAing or teaching a class taught in English, but we only benefit from having people come from all over the world to educate our students.

English testing is certainly one part of the solution, but the TOEFL (the standardized English test for foreigners who want to come to study in the US) is deeply flawed. There have been many full scores registered by students with very poor English, but who had simply learned how to take the test in a prep school.

Maybe I’m just tired, but it’s frustrating to see the foreign grad students, who I generally take to be some of the hardest working folks on a campus, getting painted with such a broad brush.