LINGUIST List 3.601

Tue 21 Jul 1992

Disc: Accents in the Classroom

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1. Marianna Dipaolo, Re: 3.589 Accents in the Classroom
2. Geoffrey Russom, Re: 3.589 Accents in the Classroom

Message 1: Re: 3.589 Accents in the Classroom

A couple of subscribers sent me Barbara Abbott's message last week in
which she mentioned the paper comparing evaluations of international
and domestic TAs on which I collaborated. It's called "Are
International Graduate Students Less Effective as College Teaching
Assistants than American TAs?" I'd be happy to send copies to any of
you interested in the subject.

Marianna Di Paolo
dipaoloanthro.utah.edu

Message 2: Re: 3.589 Accents in the Classroom

When I TAed a section of sociolinguistics at SUNY/Stony Brook in the
early 1970's, one of my students, Harvey, who wanted to be a teacher,
was concerned that he would be barred from the classroom because of
his "speech defect". He was told he had something called "infantile
r", supposedly a cognitive deficit. What he did was to pronounce
"r" as "w". I asked him whether anyone had told him how to make a
retroflex "r", and he said they hadn't. When I described what the
tongue does in making such a sound, he was able to produce it
after about three tries. I told Harvey that his dialect sounded like
the dialect of John DeLury, a city official I had seen on TV. Harvey
thought DeLury probably came from his neighborhood (Bedford-Stuyvestant).
An obvious project for the course in Harvey's case was taping his
family and friends to see if their "r" was like his. It was.
As I remember, the sound tended to be somewhere between my [w] and
a German [r], a bit like like Tom Brokaw's "r". By the end of the
course, Harvey could switch to a retroflex "r" pretty much at will.
He said he found this sort of adaptation easier when he thought of
it as a concession to an intolerant society.

 -- Rick