They are of course against the horrible initiative that says that teachers with “heavily accented” English are to be removed. These are their main facts; (7) and (8) are my favorite points:
- ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
- Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
- Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don’t speak Spanish.
- Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
- It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
- There are many different ‘accents’ within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
- Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
- There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.
They later elaborate on (7), and it’s pretty interesting:
Evidence exists that listeners’ perceptions of ‘foreign accented speech’ are often inaccurate – listeners’ predisposed to view a speaker has having a ‘foreign’ identity are likely to perceive that person’s speech as accented, even when it is not (Rubin, 1992; Derwing and Monroe 2009). Nancy Niedzielski’s (1996, 1999) work shows that people think the same sounds are [more ‘standard’ or less ‘standard’] depending on whether they are told the speaker is from Canada vs. right over the border in Detroit (participants, of course, viewed their own dialect as ‘standard’). In Rubin’s work, these beliefs lead to lower comprehension scores for listeners who think that they are listening to ‘foreign accented speech’ (even when they are not). To the extent that policies like this further stigmatize foreign accented speech, therefore, they are counterproductive to learning.
