re: #601 Aceofwhat?

Do you need me to find a paper with data showing that a teacher who can’t be well understood isn’t going to be very effective? Really?

As the Washington Post article that you asked me to read says, what is clear to one student may be unclear to another. A teacher with a Mexcian accent may actually be more comprehensible to people who speak English with a Mexican accent.

There is a conflation of at least two things here: Whether the teacher can be understood, and whether the language acquisition from that teacher will be affected in any way.

It’s a crappy bill. Do you really want to extrapolate that to mean that the accent has no bearing on the effectiveness of a teacher? Because i can find you an accent that will.

Yes, I really would like to see papers on that, given that what I have read shows that having an accent similar to the spoken language of the student can be helpful.

This is one paper that argues that:

muse.jhu.edu

MCardle has done some extensive empircal testing, mainly attempting to solve an opposite problem— why students who could become bilingual don’t— and the main outcome from that was that multi-language classes (as in, the teacher teaches in both Spanish and English) are just as good as monolanguage ones.