[IP] more on Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said
Begin forwarded message:
From: Suresh Ramasubramanian <suresh@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 28, 2005 1:07:20 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: Egor Kobylkin <egor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign
Teacher Said
David Farber wrote:
or something, but just their language skills. And interesting
enough, to get admitted to a serious university one has to pass
TOEFL and GMAT, both of them not the easiest test in spoken and
written English out there. One which passed TOEFL would be
certainly in a position to explain chemistry to a freshman.
If you are on a campus, do a quick poll - pick as many indian and
chinese students as you can, who have all passed toefl and/or gmat
Then see how many of them have an accent you can cut with a knife.
Then see how many more have a weird mix of american and native
accents that has the added advantage of sounding like gibberish to
both their countrymen and to americans
Then drop in to any of the TOEFL / GRE / GMAT coaching centers in
india or china .. those exams are fairly easy to pass if you can cram
your way through them.
Then add the tendency at least some non native speakers of English
have to think in their own language, translate this mentally, on the
fly, to english and then speak .. the resulting english will follow a
scansion / grammar that sounds rather different from normal
english .. which is one of the main reasons why you get the weird
grammatical constructs and words that get called "chinglish",
"hinglish" or maybe "engrish"
And anyway, with 50% of the foreign teachers in the university
system, it is not a question of the students being able to
understand teachers, but rather teachers to have enough motivation
and abilities to learn English. The notion "foreign" will not be
helpful in improving the quality of US education system, I believe.
I'm in full agreement here, especially as I have several friends who
are PhD students who spend a lot of their time teaching courses at
american campuses all the way from Purdue to UAB (U of Alabama at
Birmingham)
regards
--srs
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