It’s a common complaint around campus, and every student seems to have a horror story about it. Learning from, and trying to understand, a foreign instructor with a heavy accent seems to trouble many University of Wisconsin students.
“I had one, and I had to drop the course,” UW senior Bret Ellis said. “He said he had had trouble with students understanding him. But he had trouble understanding us, too. By the time the first exam came, I was screwed.”
Sophomore Katie Kasprzyk also had a frustrating experience with one of her instructors.
“He was from Arabia,” she said. “He would tell us it was easier to learn things in his country, and then he would yell at us in Arabic.”
“I’m not racist,” Kasprzyk continued. “But if you’re going to teach in America, at least speak English.”
However, Marco Loskamp, a TA from Germany, said the problem has been exaggerated.
Regarding his own accent, he said, “It was more like a funny thing; it wasn’t a problem. If a teacher is nice and respects his class, and a student still does poorly, then it’s probably the fault of the material and not the language in the final end.”
Ellis agreed complicated material can play a role in impeding students’ learning, but said language problems also play a big role, especially in math and science departments, where difficult material and the language barrier can make a nasty combination.
“We’re paying a lot of money for a professor we can’t understand,” he said. “In the math and science departments it’s a major problem.”
“Having them assume we understand is my No. 1 problem,” Ellis said. “They need to post notes of lectures on the net. They need to match the professors and the TAs up a little better, so you don’t have two foreign instructors. They need to send some of them through an English course, too.”
Rick Burnson, a faculty associate in the English as a second language program, believes the heart of the problem goes deeper than language. Burnson explained there is a lot less give-and-take between instructors and their students in foreign countries.
“They’re really bright people, but they come from a very different education system,” he said.
Also, based on a test gauging English comprehension of audio alone versus audio and video, Burnson noted most of his students did better without seeing the speaker, indicating the importance of clear speaking. “Miscommunication goes on for many different reasons,” he said.
Citing this finding, his 10-week course for incoming foreign TAs focuses not only on language but also on teaching skills and cultural differences.
“These TAs can’t figure out what students are expecting. We show them different techniques to have in a toolbox,” he said.
Since starting out at the office in 1985, Burnson said he has watched at least three positive trends develop in readying foreign-born teachers to teach English-speaking students.
“The level of English they are learning is improving. The Internet is giving them a lot more input. And there are more real-life situations taught in foreign institutions.”
Ulrike Bostelmann, a math TA from Germany, believes the problem can be overcome. “At the beginning it was hard,” she said, “But it’s gotten better.”
“They (the students) think it’s a language problem,” Bostelmann continued, “But it’s the material itself. If I try to understand the language, I get used to it.”
However, Bostelmann still believed the English as a second language course was helpful not only in gaining a more thorough understanding of English, but also in helping him relate to his students themselves. “I had trouble understanding,” he said. “And it was good to get to know the culture better.”
