Helping foreign students get through American ears

ACCENT TRAINING

Many universities in the United States are using sophisticated tools to train their overseas teaching assistants on the American accent, writes Richard Perez Pena

For hundreds of grown men and women here, work can mean sticking fingers into models of the human mouth, or trying to talk while peering at their tongues in mirrors or while hopping up and down stairs.

They are foreign graduate students at Ohio University who are spending up to two hours a day learning how to speak so that their American colleagues and students will understand them. Many of them spend more than a year in the programme, and they are not allowed to teach until their English instructors say they are ready.

It is a complaint familiar to millions of alumni of research universities: the master’s or doctoral candidate from overseas, employed as a teaching assistant, whose accent is too thick for undergraduate students to penetrate. And it is an issue that many universities are addressing more seriously, using a better set of tools, than in years past.

“These are often students whose reading and writing in English is excellent, but whom Americans have a very hard time comprehending, and it calls for a lot of work,” said Dawn Bikowski, the director of the English Language Improvement Program here.

At American universities, one in every six graduate students hails from another country — about 300,000 of them, almost half from China and India, according to the Institute of International Education. In science and technology fields, foreigners make up nearly half of the graduate students.

Those from China and other East Asian countries are often like Xingbo Liu, a graduate student in nutrition here, who said she had taken English classes nearly all her life.
“But we only learn how to write and read,” she said, “how to choose the right answer on a written test.”

Many Indian or African students have done most of their formal education in English and are comfortable speaking it, but with accents that challenge American ears.

“This is something that nationwide, people are paying a lot more attention to,” said James Tierney, the director of the English Language Program at Yale University.

Universities worry not only about the foreigners’ ability to function as students and teachers, but also about “competing on an equal footing in the job market when they graduate.”

Graduate students require particular attention because their exposure to American education and culture can be much narrower, said Julia Moore, the director of the English Language Program at Northwestern University, with “friends, colleagues, roommates and even faculty mentors who speak their languages.”

In addition to requiring language instruction for many graduate students, Northwestern enrols them in a monthlong summer immersion programme in American language and culture.

In some cases, university action has been prodded by politicians. Louisiana, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Washington have laws requiring that instructors be intelligible, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and similar bills have been introduced in many other states in the last decade.

Test scores

Foreign applicants to American universities must submit scores on standardised tests of their English skills. In the not-too-distant past, that almost always meant a written exam. But university officials say that the growth of tests that include oral components has given them a much better idea of applicants’ speaking skills.

The test most commonly used by American institutions, the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or TOEFL, added a spoken portion in 2005 when it was first administered online. The company that produces the exam, ETS, says that 98 per cent of people who take it now take the Internet version, which includes listening and speaking.

In another step forward, professors say, increasingly sophisticated software programs analyse and critique speech. One programme, NativeAccent, which became available three years ago, has been adopted by more than 100 universities.

Briju Thankachan, an Indian graduate student in instructional technology, has spent hundreds of hours using NativeAccent. The software can isolate hundreds of pronunciation issues and even show animations of how to position parts of the mouth for each sound.

“Every morning I would hear him repeating things over and over into the computer, and you could hear him getting better,” said Thankachan’s wife, Betsy J Briju, a visiting assistant professor in plant biology.

Long way to go

The comprehension problem is far from solved. Even at an institution like Ohio University, with an unusually robust remedial programme, undergraduate students say they have run into hard-to-understand teaching assistants.

“You get better at understanding after a while, and they’re willing to talk it over again, but it can be hard,” said Karen Martinez, a sophomore from Chicago.

The university’s efforts to address the accent problem date to the 1980s. Every foreign student’s command of spoken English is assessed on arrival, and each year about 300 go through the improvement programme, part of the linguistics department.

In classes, the students learn to break language into individual sounds, forcing them to be aware of how each part of the mouth is positioned to make a particular bit, while instructors contort their faces and touch their tongues to drive home the point. Students take sentences apart to learn rhythm, emphasis, pauses and rising and falling pitch — elements that can convey as much information as words — and reinforce them with stair-hops and other physical exercises.

“Many people come here without having learned intonation at all,” said Lara Wallace, a lecturer in linguistics. “Everything comes out in a flat monotone, which makes an accent even harder to understand.”

Students are assigned to practice in computer labs, using the speech analysis software, and — possibly the most unpopular exercise — recording audio or video of themselves speaking. They have to transcribe those recordings verbatim, with every pause, false start, repetition or “um” noted.

“I like it and I hate it,” said Xuan He, a 24-year-old sociology student. “Every time, I feel like I sound very stupid. But it is useful.”