Accented Teachers May Be Better for English Language Learners

This week, I read an article entitled "Accented teachers may be better for English language learners: study" which was published in the Washington Post and based off a 2010 Israeli study that showed how English learners may be more able to learn the language (and other disciplines) from teachers who have the same accents as them. This finding goes against the fundamental logic that Arizona officials used in banning teachers who have heavy accents.

The study's design consisted of sixty participants: 20 native Hebrew speakers, 20 people from the former Soviet Union, and 20 Israeli Arabs who started learning Hebrew at age 7. The experimenters put together audio recordings of Hebrew phrases with the last word pronounced with either a Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, or English accent. Each participant was timed and asked to identify the Hebrew word. The results showed that Hebrew speakers showed no difference depending on the accent, but Russian and Arabic speakers could more quickly identify the word when it was pronounced in their own accent. The study's basic explanation for the findings was that when learning from a person with the same accent, a student does not have to spend extra time trying to understand English in an unfamiliar accent.

This study has broad implications for all of educational theory and practice. Overall, the findings suggest that students will be more able to effectively learn from teachers who share the same accents as them. In a nation that is becoming more increasingly diverse, attracting immigrants from all over the world, this study can be seen as a strong advocate for diversity in teachers. Relating the study to current politics, this study therefore suggests that in a state like Arizona, ESL students from various Spanish speaking countries may be better off learning from a teacher who has a familiar accent. This is exactly the type of teacher that Arizona has banned from its education system.

This study and its connections with very current politics reveals how closely intertwined language and psychology is with current events and major political/educational decisions. While one study is certainly not enough to make its claims "true" (very little can be considered "true" in psychological/scientific research in general), its findings do provide a certain amount of experimental evidence that Arizona's new ban on teachers with accents is fundamentally flawed from an educational effectiveness standpoint (not to mention problematic from other social standpoints). If teachers are indeed more effective for students if they share a common accent, then teachers from Spanish speaking countries should be sought after--not banned--to teach in schools that have large Spanish speaking populations. I am now wondering whether or not this new data will soon influence Arizona's educational legislation, as I believe it should, or whether Arizonan officials will ignore these findings and continue to justify their measures using flawed logic.

As follow-up experiments, I would be interested to see if these findings are also seen in different language speaking groups- for example, those who speak Spanish or Mandarin. Is the magnitude of the difference between recognizing a word pronounced in your own accent or another accent similar across all language speaking communities- why or why not? Additionally, the article mentioned an important follow up study that would help to determine how much effort is involved in both processing unfamiliar accents and processing new material. As evidenced by all the potential follow-up studies and the connections to current day politics, I believe this study was very significant, intriguing, and politically relevant.

Article:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/learning/accented-teachers-may-be-bette.html

Original Study description from Israeli news source:

http://www.israel21c.org/201003077751/culture/putting-the-accent-on-language-perception