Source: WCCO-TV (Minneapolis/St. Paul)
Instructors who want to teach at Minnesota colleges would have to prove they can speak English clearly before appearing at the head of the classroom, if a bill at the Legislature becomes law.
The bill would require schools in Minnesota State Colleges and Universities to ensure their undergraduate teachers speak plain, unaccented English. It would request the same of the University of Minnesota, which the Legislature has limited authority to regulate.
Rep. Bud Heidgerken, a former teacher and current cafe owner, said he's heard plenty from former students and employees about their struggles to understand professors with thick accents.
"I've had many students say they dropped a course or delayed graduation for a semester because they couldn't get around this one professor they couldn't understand," the Freeport Republican said. "All I'm trying to accomplish is getting the best education we have for postsecondary students."
OK, I've lived in Minnesota for two years now. I find this both sad and amusing because not only should this be considered unconstitutional (didn't all non-British immigrants speak broken or no English when they first arrived many, many years ago?), but I find this ridiculous when Minnesotan dialect is very difficult for my Hoosier-born ears to understand. I find anyone from California speaks too quickly, and people with Kentuckian drawls (like my mother's family pronouncing "wash" as "warsh") to be slightly irritating.
This is normal.
Most people have problems understanding those from other regions of the U.S., not just problems with people who speak English as a second language. There are places that even offer courses in order to "reduce regional dialects and use general American speech for native speakers".
Yet every day, we're are faced with someone who may be from another part of the country, and we strain to understand them as they're talking to us. Every nation goes through this. Germany has anywhere between 50 to 250 dialects, and Japan has a dozen different regional dialects and many different local sub-dialects (as different as one village not speaking the same dialect as the village 10 miles down the road). People from London have problems with understanding people from Liverpool; these cities are both in Britain, but they are roughly 222 miles away from each other. Britons claim they can't understand Americans, and vice versa, even though we all speak forms of the same language: English (though many Britons will tell you that American-English is "bastardized English," and I am inclined to agree).
Peter Hudleston, associate dean for student affairs at the university's Institute of Technology, said comprehension problems sometimes crop up. But he said school officials warn students "they have to expect to be able to understand and converse with people from other parts of the English-speaking world. They have to be able to deal with different accents."
Travis Reindl, director of state policy analysis with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, finds the legislation troublesome.
"If we start sending a message here that if you can't speak the king's English flawlessly, we don't want you in our classrooms, that sends a message that the U.S. is not a friendly place for them," he said. "(Besides), there are parts of this country where you would swear that English is a second language based on your own background. If you took somebody from Minnesota and plunked him in Mississippi, then you might have a question."
My point, exactly.
So how do we solve it? Well, normally in this country, if we can't understand another person (usually someone we assume is a native speaker), we either politely ask them to repeat themselves (and this isn't always the case either, as we tend to be rude to one another) or (if they appear to be a "foreigner") we tell them to "learn some English because you're living in America!!!"
I really don't understand why it's so hard for these students who are supposedly having problems with understanding their professors to ask them kindly if they'd repeat themselves. Don't they do this already when the professors speak English?
Perhaps we can offer a fair trade: non-natives will speak non-accented English only if natives also speak non-accented English. Fair enough?
In all honesty, this country needs to get with the program. Almost every nation on the planet has several different languages listed as the "official language(s)," and almost everyone is learning English now; some nations, like Japan, even require all high school students to learn English. Can't we do the same? Spanish is already considered by most the second language of the U.S., so why can't we require our students to learn it (some schools in heavily-populated Hispanic areas do require this)?
Don't get me wrong...I also believe that those coming into this country should learn English, but this isn't because I believe that English is the best language (in fact, it's the hardest language to learn); it's because people should learn--they should want to learn--how to communicate with others across the world. I believe the same should apply to those of us who are natives, as well.
We shouldn't fear differences in others. Really, this is the sort of stuff one learns in Kindergarten.
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