Foreign Teaching Assistants:Booo!

carnation · #1 08-21-2002, 10:37 AM

Have any of you ever had foreign students whom you couldn't understand as your teaching assistants in class?

My 2 daughters at Valdosta each have one and they're worried. I can understand--at Auburn, I had a Taiwanese TA for Organic lab and an Iraqi for calculus. I had to drop calculus until the next semester to get someone I could understand and as for orgainc lab..we had a lot of explosions we shouldn't have because we didn't understand the guy!

I hear that Auburn has gone to requiring the Spoken TOEFL test to weed out foreign students with heavy accents as teachers. Many schools haven't. They need to! What do you think?

The1calledTKE · #2 08-21-2002, 10:56 AM

Teaching assitants at Valdosta?? Thats strange. As long as I been here I have had only professors teach their own classes. I have had some foreign teachers that don't speak english very well but I am a good book learner so I did have any problems.

lionlove · #3 08-21-2002, 11:07 AM

It depends on the subject I guess. My school doesn't have TAs, only professors. As a French and International studies double major, I wish there were more foreign professors at my school. I think they would add a unique perspective. In high school, I had a music teacher who was a Japanese immigrant. At the beginning, it was hard to understand her but I got used to the accent and I began to understand her. This summer I worked with people from all over the Middle East and again, it was hard at first but after a while I got used to hearing the accent.

Obviously, if the teacher's english is SO bad that it is incomprehensible, they shouldn't be teaching but sometimes it just takes some time to get used to hearing a different accent.

Dionysus · #4 08-21-2002, 11:10 AM

There definitely should be some sort of verbal proficiency test for foreign professors, teachers, and teacher assistants at schools
and colleges. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to figure out what hell someone is saying. I had to switch several
teachers because of that. Whats worse, they get mad when you ask them to repeat themselves.

carnation · #5 08-21-2002, 12:59 PM

I'm all for foreign professors--as long as they're understandable! It is just so frustrating to have some guy launch into a difficult subject and you can't follow. By the time you get used to his accent, you're behind in the course! My daughters have grown up hearing a lot of accents since I taught ESOL for 10 years and the students seem to be over here 24/7 to this day; they're pretty frightened by these guys, though.

Hiring directors need to take ability in spoken English into account! Last year, our children's high school hired a Spanish teacher from Costa Rica. This lady couldn't speak English (well, she thought she could) and all these honors students were failing Spanish 2 because she couldn't explain anything. The parents were horribly frustrated because they couldn't communicate during conferences and I thought there was going to be some violence. Many of her students refused to go on to Spanish 3 because she ruined it for them.

Instead of getting rid of her, the school put her in charge of ESOL. Oh, great. She can hardly speak English and now she's going to teach what little she knows to them with a heavy Costa Rican accent.

KillarneyRose · #6 08-21-2002, 03:27 PM

Carnation,
I know this is off thread, but I was wondering if your kids speak Spanish? I just thought of that because I know you teach it and I was curious.

Back to our regularly scheduled thread...

carnation · #7 08-21-2002, 03:40 PM

The oldest five are quite good at Spanish! We frequently speak in Spanish at home. The oldest is a Spanish major and Ballerina will at least minor in it. The church has a Spanish-speaking church on the grounds and the whole family is very active in working in the Hispanic community here and babysitting in their church nursery.

The sixth is starting Spanish at school and the rest know a whole bunch of Spanish words.

KappaKittyCat · #8 08-21-2002, 05:05 PM

I had my first TA experience last summer when I took Italian over the summer at UW Madison. Just having a TA was shocking to me at first. At my school the average class size is 12-15 and it's all full professors (we don't have a grad program, so it has to be). It was actually a really good experience. Both teachers were very fluent in English, though it was Italian at the level where they explained everything in Italian anyway. One of my TAs was from Toscana, which was very helpful to me because I moved there right after class ended and I could understand the natives' accents.

But... I do have this to say about the language school that I attended in Firenze. The fact that you're a native speaker of any language does not mean that you're qualified to teach it as a second language. My teacher there did not speak any other language, and this was a class with 5 Americans, 2 Koreans, 2 Swedes, 1 Japanese, 1 Mexican, and 1 Rumanian. It made for some communication difficulties, let me tell you.

The situation came to a head on September 11th. The program director for the American students (which included the Rumanian girl in my class) burst into the room to tell us that two hijacked airplanes had just crashed into the Twin Towers, the first tower had collapsed, and the second one was about to. She said it very quickly and then ran off to tell the rest of the American students, who were scattered throughout 6 other classrooms. We American students sat there gaping at each other, some of us crying, and the teacher just kept teaching. She didn't get it. I had to explain to her what had happened, and she thought I'd mixed up my vocabulary. She refused to believe me and she wouldn't let us go down to watch CNN with the rest of our group. Some of us left anyway.

The next morning she said she was very sorry.

Jeff OTMG · #9 08-21-2002, 05:14 PM

I have, and I make it very clear to them the first day of class that they better learn enough English or they will have a hard time covering all the topics required in the class because I will interupt them repeatedly until they pronouce a word correctly. If you get no satisfaction just tell the administration that you will go to the local media and have them tell the world that the teaching staff at the university is incompetent, being unable to successfully communicate with the students.