FUCK Arizona! - Racism

[Magnizeal]

So, now an accent means you're not fluent in English?

Ms. Aguayo is a veteran teacher in the Creighton Elementary School District in central Phoenix as well an immigrant from northern Mexico who learned English as an adult and taught it as a second language. Confronted about her accent by her school principal several years ago, Ms. Aguayo took a college acting class, saw a speech pathologist and consulted with an accent reduction specialist, none of which transformed her speech.

As Ms. Aguayo has struggled, though, something else has changed. Arizona, after almost a decade of sending monitors to classrooms across the state to check on teachers’ articulation, recently made a sharp about-face on the issue. A federal investigation of possible civil rights violations prompted the state to call off its accent police.

“It was a repeated pattern of misuse of the language or mispronunciation of the language that we were looking for,” said Andrew LeFevre, a spokesman for the State Department of Education. “It’s critically important that teachers act as models when it comes to language.”

But the federal review found that the state had written up teachers for pronouncing “the” as “da,” “another” as “anuder” and “lives here” as “leeves here.”

If you want the full story, it's right here.

[Admiral Lithp]

I'm sorry, but I agree. If it were an older class? Or one focused more on writing than speech? Sure. They should know basic pronunciation. But K-2 is an age range where you're picking up the language yourself & may be plagued with speech problems already.

So, assuming there was a severe enough accent, I don't think that person should be teaching young children English.

[Kit Walker]

Last year, I had a college professor who had immigrated here from China. Intelligent woman, knew the material backwards and forwards...but sometimes her accent made her a bit tough to understand. Having her teach any lower than high school would be somewhat unwise, because if adults have trouble understanding her sometimes then children are damn sure going to have trouble. It doesn't make her not fluent, it doesn't make her a bad educator. It makes her ill suited for certain levels of student.

That said, I doubt Arizona was employing this policy in a way any more complex than 'Fucking Mexicans, man. Am I right?"

[N. De Plume]

Right. The fact that this teacher’s accent was not a problem until only recently suggests shenanigans.

And isn’t the the/da thing a feature of certain regional United States accents?

[ltfred]

Oct 5, 2011 18:34:01 GMT -5 Admiral Lithp said:

So, assuming there was a severe enough accent, I don't think that person should be teaching young children English.

Then you've got to ban virtually everyone from teaching english. Only Oxford professors have no accent.

It's particularly rich for Southern Americans to accuse other people of having an accent. The nerve!

[Admiral Lithp]

Invalid conclusion. For multiple reasons. The difference between learning common & professional English, the fact that I explicitly said "severe enough," the fact that I'm SPECIFICALLY referring to a certain age group & you're making no such distinction....

[ltfred]

Oct 5, 2011 20:08:40 GMT -5 Admiral Lithp said:

Invalid conclusion. For multiple reasons. The difference between learning common & professional English, the fact that I explicitly said "severe enough," the fact that I'm SPECIFICALLY referring to a certain age group & you're making no such distinction....

Well, okay. Then you've got to train a lot more people in Oxford English pronunciation, even if they're only going to teach all America's children good English or even just people who don't speak it as a first language. In the meantime, people with typically severe, ugly accents should refrain from firing other people for having a severe (typically less ugly) accent.

[Thejebusfire]

I have no problem as long as I can understand what they are saying.

[N. De Plume]

When I was in college, a high percentage of the grad students were from out of country. As a result, part of the TA evaluation us undergrads had to fill out at the end of semester included questions on the TA’s ability to speak English clearly.

I can’t say I ever really had a problem with any of them.

[sylvana]

Oct 5, 2011 20:17:14 GMT -5 ltfred said:

Well, okay. Then you've got to train a lot more people in Oxford English pronunciation, even if they're only going to teach all America's children good English or even just people who don't speak it as a first language. In the meantime, people with typically severe, ugly accents should refrain from firing other people for having a severe (typically less ugly) accent.

Let me be blunt, Ameircans have the absolute worst pronunciation of English words of any English speaking nation. However, Admiral Lithp is right. Young children learn how to pronounce English words mainly by mimicking what they hear. It would be unwise to have anyone with a particularly strong accent teaching young children (this includes people from the south as well as some local dialects of the UK)

[Napoleon the Clown]

Oct 6, 2011 1:39:08 GMT -5 sylvana said:

Oct 5, 2011 20:17:14 GMT -5 ltfred said:

Well, okay. Then you've got to train a lot more people in Oxford English pronunciation, even if they're only going to teach all America's children good English or even just people who don't speak it as a first language. In the meantime, people with typically severe, ugly accents should refrain from firing other people for having a severe (typically less ugly) accent.

Let me be blunt, Ameircans have the absolute worst pronunciation of English words of any English speaking nation.

Blunt and arrogant are not synonyms. American accents have an enormous degree of variation. Not all of them talk like they're from the Bronx. Not all of them sound like they're from the Deep South. Most of them have an accent you wouldn't even be able to discern just where it's from. Could be Canada. But hey, don't let nuances get in the way of your sweeping generalizations. There is no cockney accent in the UK! Just the proper London, upper-class accent. Exactly as the English language was first conceived!

Oh, wait. English doesn't have a standardized pronunciation and is filled with instances where the general trends are completely and totally ignored or outright upside down.

However, Admiral Lithp is right. Young children learn how to pronounce English words mainly by mimicking what they hear. It would be unwise to have anyone with a particularly strong accent teaching young children (this includes people from the south as well as some local dialects of the UK)

Because a child only picks up the foreign sounding accents, not the speaking patterns that they most often hear. Such as those of friends, family, school mates, and random strangers. It's just that one person that talks funny.

Pip pip, cheerio.

[Kit Walker]

Oct 6, 2011 1:39:08 GMT -5 sylvana said:

However, Admiral Lithp is right. Young children learn how to pronounce English words mainly by mimicking what they hear. It would be unwise to have anyone with a particularly strong accent teaching young children (this includes people from the south as well as some local dialects of the UK)

Well that's just asinine. The problem isn't the kids developing the teacher's accent, it is being able to understand the teacher. Take that professor of mine I mentioned - she pronounced all her Vs as Ws. This was not too big an issue for college students, as we could figure out what she meant by "non-werbal" communication. For a group who were trying to expand their "wocabularly", she might not be the greatest educator. But I had a math teacher in high school who spoke with a distinct southern twang and was perfectly understandable. It is, and I know this sounds bad, the non-native accents that would cause problems, not the ones the kids will be growing up around.

[Mlle Antéchrist]

However, Admiral Lithp is right. Young children learn how to pronounce English words mainly by mimicking what they hear. It would be unwise to have anyone with a particularly strong accent teaching young children (this includes people from the south as well as some local dialects of the UK)

Under that logic, I should have picked up my dad's English/Aussie mix accent to some degree, being that I most certainly spent a lot of time around him during my formative years -- more time than I spent around any one particular teacher. Yet I speak like a typical Canadian.

Additionally, it's unfair to label a particular English-speaking accent as "bad pronunciation" when the proper pronunciation of terms is a heavily subjective matter.

[N. De Plume]

Oct 6, 2011 8:48:28 GMT -5 Mlle Antéchrist said:

Additionally, it's unfair to label a particular English-speaking accent as "bad pronunciation" when the proper pronunciation of terms is a heavily subjective matter.

Indeed. What’s so good about Oxford English that makes it better than Rural Alabama English? Perhaps Rural Alabama has improved on the language and is the pinnacle of English.

[Armand Tanzarian]

I'm bidialectic; I speak with a somewhat standard Midwestern American accent with a smattering of Fargoism AND I speak Manglish. Depending on which accent I speak in I have pretty good English or terrible english. So which one is it?