I found out today, via the LinguistList, that the faculty from the University of Arizona Linguistics Department has sent an official statement (pdf) to the Governor and Superintendent of their fair state regarding an apparent “no accent” education policy.
Of course, the UA linguists make some good, if obvious (to me) points, for example, there is no such thing as unaccented speech. If one person’s speech is accented, it is accented relative to some other person’s speech, which is itself accented, relative to the first person’s speech as well as any sufficiently distinct third person’s speech, and so on.
They also make some good, non-obvious points. Two stand out as particularly interesting to me. One (Point 1) is the fact that accentedness and intelligibility are “partially independent.” (which, to be pedantic, is a bit like saying someone is somewhat pregnant). The interesting point is that a speaker can be rated as having a heavy accent yet still be highly intelligible.
The other interesting, non-obvious point (Point 4) is that variability in speech can actually help a (language) learner. You might think that having regular, stable input would enable a language learner to focus on whatever it is they’re trying to learn, but it turns out that experiencing more, and more variable, tokens of speech sounds is better.
However, I do want to pick a nit with part of Point 3:
3) Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
Foreign born speakers who learned English after age 13 may nevertheless attain fluency – even if their understanding of their second language is slightly different than that of speakers who began acquiring the language before that age (Piske et al, 2001). In addition, these speakers’ near‐adult experience of learning English as a second language gives them personal exposure to the particular features of English that are hard and/or easy for second language learners, especially second language learners from their language background. In particular teachers originally from Mexico have a deep knowledge of what is hard for their Mexican‐American students to learn about English.
It is undoubtedly true that non-native English speakers have had plenty of “personal exposure” to difficult-to-acquire English structures, and I suppose that it’s reasonable to say that teachers from Mexico would have “deep knowledge” about such structures. But it does not follow that either of these will make an L1 Spanish/L2 English teacher any better at teaching English to native Spanish speakers.
Starting in 1996, I studied Portuguese for three years, and I traveled to Brazil twice, in large part to improve my L2 Portuguese. At some point during my second trip to Brazil, I asked a friend if I was using the preterite and imperfect verb tenses correctly. My intuition told me that I was not, and my friend told me the same. I decided to do the opposite of what I thought I should do when conjugating a verb for the past tense, and, lo and behold, a day or two later, my friend told me I was doing much better.
The point with respect to the UA Linguistics statement is that I do not believe that this experience would make me a better teacher to native English speakers trying to learn Portuguese. Sure, I could point out to them that it’s difficult to figure out when to use the preterite or the imperfect, but they would learn that fact on their own as soon as the issue came up. I could tell the students to do the opposite, except that I wouldn’t really know if that would improve their accuracy or not, since I wouldn’t know if they were using the forms correctly in the first place, because I still don’t really know how to use them (at least, not in a completely native-like way).
And this is just one relatively simple non-native “structure.” I have a hard time imagining that “personal exposure” to L2 English do-support, wh-movement, or allophonic variation (had to get a soundy bit in there, force of habit) would help a teacher teach a learner how to “acquire” the appropriate grammatical knowledge. Of course, the UA linguists hedge their bets by saying that the personal experience may help, not that it necessarily will.
The information is, admittedly, a few years old now, but based on what I learned in getting an M.A. in ESL at the University of Hawai`i, it’s not clear to me that anyone really knows what makes a good language teacher good, and it seems clear to me that sharing a language background is neither necessary nor sufficient to do so.
[cross-posted at Language Module]