About once every other year a student walks into Steve Carr’s office complaining. They say their teaching assistant can’t speak English.

And about once every other year, Carr, McCormick’s associate dean of undergraduate engineering, brings the TA in for a chat, during which he usually finds himself wondering “what’s the problem?”

“I sympathize with students who are in a course (and are having trouble understanding their TA),” Carr says. “But if they meet the standards of the Grad School, I’m sure they can do the job.”

It’s a common refrain among students that they simply cannot understand their instructors. Sometimes they talk about professors, more often teaching assistants. No one denies there are occasional serious problems. “I’m sure we let the students down sometimes,” Carr says. But administrators and English as a second language instructors say that often times, students might need to do nothing more than tough it out and learn how to deal with an accent.

Ravi Shah was one of these students. It was the first day of Introduction to Electrical Engineering and the professor was ladling the material in a thick Chinese accent. “I had no idea what the hell he was talking about,” says Shah.

In interviews for this article, accents were the single most commonly reported source of miscommunication between instructors and undergraduates. Both the Speaking Proficiency English Assessment Kit (SPEAK) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) test the severity of an international student’s accent. But because pronunciation is only a single criteria within one of four grading categories, a test taker’s accent is by no means a dominant factor in deciding exam scores.

There’s a reason for this: Education experts agree that a lot more goes into teaching than an instructor’s inflection.

“Some TAs may have a heavy accent but they might have very good communicative strategies,” says Xiaoming Xi, a research scientist for Educational Testing Services. “It takes years to reduce somebody’s accent. It takes a lot of work. They’ve already passed that critical age where you can learn another language without much effort.”

But to McCormick Dean Carr, the problem can have to do with the student. “Complaining students often come from a background without a lot of diversity,” he says, saying, for instance, that a student who grows up in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood is probably going to have trouble understanding a Belgian accent. “We’re not Anglophyllic,” he says of McCormick.

Of course, there are students who insist that sometimes, their instructors simply don’t seem to have a grasp of the language. Marla Brizel, a Weinberg sophomore, says that things got so bad in one political science course that she eventually convinced her professor to switch her to another section. “I have TAs that have thick accents, but they understand they have thick accents,” Brizel says. “It wasn’t his accent. It was actually the English words he was trying to say.”

However, many undergraduates actually agree with Carr on this point. Shah says that after a few lectures and attending a single office hour, his comprehension of his Chinese professor vastly improved. Familiarity also helped McCormick sophomore Mychal Kubiak through his freshman year calculus discussion sections. The 19-year-old went to a high school in southern California with a large Chinese population.

“Luckily, though, I grew up with a lot of Asian people,” he says. “So I can understand an Asian accent pretty well.”

Northwestern requires all graduate students who speak English as a second language to pass a verbal skills test before teaching a course. This means a 50 out of 60 on the SPEAK, or a 26 out of 30 on the newly-developed speaking section of the TOEFL

“For most of the students who get a 50, it seems like they are ready,” says Elisa German, assistant director of NU’s ESL program. “The test is designed to present them with a lot of different communicative tasks.”

But NU’s requirements are lower than recommendations for other institutions, according to a study conducted by Educational Testing Services. The suggestion for the University of Florida is a 27 out of 30 on the speaking section of the TOEFL, same for UCLA. Still, NU’s threshold is not far from these numbers and is actually the same or better than those of other schools. The University of California-Irvine has the exact same test requirements as NU and virtually all universities set 50 as the base-line for the SPEAK test.

Spoken English tests were originally developed because of a demand to evaluate international TAs, says Xi of ETS. The company, which designs tests like the TOEFL, SPEAK and SAT, launched the Test of Spoken English in 1979. “You can call (the test) more of a general English proficiency measure,” Xi says. “It looks at food, travel, entertainment and very general intellectual interests.”

Today, the exam is being phased out for the new speaking section of TOEFL, but universities such as NU still use old questions from the test for the SPEAK. Students listen to questions over headphones and have a short amount of time to respond into a microphone. Graduate students in German’s department then score the recordings based on the speaker’s ability to answer the question, their awareness of their audience, their coherence and delivery – criteria mandated by the test’s designer. Graders are trained annually by the testing company.

For example, the test asks readers to tell a story based on pictures, give the advantages and disadvantages of an issue and asks them to role play with someone like a boss. “That test was not that tough of a problem,” says Mert Arslanalp, a native of Turkey and TA for Political Science 345, National Security. “It was pretty straight forward, and I took it and passed it.”

In 1988, University of Georgia Professor Donald Rubin conducted a study to test the source of the barrier between students and teaching assistants. He recorded a native English speaker giving a lecture and played it over two photographs of teaching videos. One was a white face, the other was Chinese. He then showed the photos to groups of undergraduate students and tested their comprehension afterwards. Not only did the students consistently say they understood more when the audio was matched up with a white face, but some students says they detected an accent with the Chinese face. “I think definitely there is this perception that would maybe make an undergrad student try less hard when they sense something different,” Xi says.

Kubiak didn’t say that other students in his math class weren’t trying, but he did acknowledge there was a definite lack in involvement. “I could tell that a lot of the other kids in the class wouldn’t ask a lot of questions because they couldn’t understand the answers,” he says. At the same time, when the TA realized he couldn’t speak English well enough to express abstract concepts, he’d resort to silently scribbling examples on the chalk board, Kubiak says. This kind of situation poses some obvious problems, Carr says. “Anyone who knows anything about pedagogy knows (just talking at students) is certainly sleep-inducing,” he says. Silently scribbling would be worse.

Arslanalp, the Turkish TA, still runs into communication problems, but he’s finding a way around it, he says. His speech is sometimes broken, and a verb tense is sometimes off. But it’s the kind of English the brain of a native speaker automatically corrects. “In the case of teaching basically, it’s not only important for them to understand what you say,” he says. “It’s also important to communicate the materials in an interesting way.”

Teaching skills courses are just as important for students like Arslanalp as being conversational in English, Xi says. As a second year political science graduate student, Arslanalp says he plans to look into them once he makes it through the three courses and thesis of his second year. “Teaching is performance,” he says.

Accordin
g to German, schools are not allowed to hire TAs who fail to meet a minimal spoken test score. But it is possible for two students who get a 50 to be at two different speaking levels. SPEAK scores range from 20 to 60, with 20 described as “no effective communication” and 60 as “communication almost always effective.” Scores are then rounded to the nearest increment of five, rounding up from 2.5. This means that a student who scores a 47.5 and 52.4 could wind up with the same final score of 50. “That’s potentially a big difference between two people,” German says.

To help students get a passing score, or beef up on their skills even after passing, the ESL department offers quarterly classes in conversational English. Kenneth Konopka teaches Conversation and Fluency, a grad-student-only class he describes as a “crash course in American English.”

“We want to make sure these TAs will be communicative with the undergrad classes,” he says. “Even if you have a pretty heavy accent that’s hard to get rid of, the idea is to be communicative.”

And undergrads and their graduate level instructors want nothing more.

“They want to help and explain,” Shah says. “If you can get over it and relate to them in a different way, they’re a lot better at being a TA.”