Illinois Fights Back With Fluency Law : Foreign Teachers Create Language Gap in Colleges

Many a confused college student has cursed calculus as if it were a foreign language, but sophomore Joe Blume found the analogy disturbingly real when he stalked out of a recent math class in disgust.

“The regular teacher was sick and there was this foreign graduate student in his place,” recalled Blume, a mathematics education major at Northern Illinois University here. “His accent was terrible. I couldn’t pick up the words. I’d just grab one here and one there. After five minutes I just got up and left. It was a wasted day.”

Blume is not alone in his frustration. A record flood of graduate students from abroad--many doubling as classroom instructors--has produced a growing national outcry from undergraduates who contend that their own schoolwork suffers when they struggle with the accented and broken English of some foreign teachers.

The result is a disturbing communications gap in academia that pits the desire for cultural diversity on campus against a student’s basic need to understand his lessons.

Pressed by a storm of complaints from students and parents, Illinois lawmakers last year passed legislation requiring state-run colleges and universities to guarantee that all their teachers are proficient in spoken English.

Gov. James R. Thompson denounced the bill as elitist and isolationist and vetoed it, but the veto was swiftly and decisively overriden by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly, and the measure--the only one of its kind in the nation--went into effect as classes opened this month.

The law is vague, failing to define a fluency standard or spell out precise punishment for failing to meet it. But it clearly implies that everyone from graduate teaching assistants to full professors should be made to speak up clearly or get out of the classroom.

In his strongly worded veto message, Thompson argued that, if such a law had been in effect years ago, renowned foreign-born thinkers and scientists such as Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun would have been barred from Illinois classrooms simply because of thick German accents. Were President James Madison alive today, he too would be ineligible to teach because of a serious speech impediment, Thompson said.

‘Cultural Elitism’

“This cultural elitism and isolation has no place in an Illinois which seeks foreign markets and foreign investments,” Thompson insisted. “To exclude so many from the ranks of potential teachers, when they have something relevant to offer our Illinois students, is to do our future students a disservice.”

But legislators disagreed, reasoning that students were being shortchanged by language barriers with their teachers.

“If you can’t understand these people, what good does it do to have them teaching in class?” asked Democratic State Sen. Patrick Welch, author of the fluency bill. “You have to consider the rights of individual students to get a good education. They’re paying for it and they shouldn’t have to be guinea pigs for foreigners trying to learn English.”

Welch, whose rural district 60 miles west of Chicago includes the Northern Illinois University campus, said 2,000 of the school’s 25,000 students signed petitions urging passage of his bill.

Many Illinois students say they go to elaborate means to avoid classes conducted by the foreign teaching assistants.

At the University of Illinois in Urbana, senior engineering major Tom Colman said that two years ago he dropped a required math course in differential equations after only the first day because the teacher’s German accent was so thick he could not take notes.

Similarly, Kelle Reczek, another Urbana senior majoring in both economics and political science, said her troubles began the first day on campus in her freshman year when she walked into a calculus class at venerable Altgeld Hall and found an Asian graduate student delivering the lecture.

“I sat down and I couldn’t understand him,” recalled Reczek, a member of a student advisory committee to the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “He had a very strong accent, and it was difficult to make out his pronunciation. We would have to stop and ask him to repeat things four or five times.”

Reczek finally got a “B” in the class but said she had to take four hours a week of outside tutoring to decipher the lectures. Since then she has dropped or switched seven classes taught by foreigners she had trouble understanding.

To some extent, the problem can be traced to broad shifts in the professional goals of American students as well as changes in the academic environment at many universities, especially large and prestigious ones, such as the 36,000-student enrollment at the University of Illinois.

It is common practice for universities to supplement their faculties with graduate teaching assistants. Often, an undergraduate signs up for a course with a full professor and finds a graduate student conducting many of the lectures and class sessions.

But in some disciplines--notably technical programs, such as engineering, physics and mathematics--the number of native-born graduate students has dropped significantly in recent years. At the same time, foreigners are flocking to the United States to take--and often to excel in--the same graduate programs Americans no longer seem to want.

According to statistics compiled by the National Research Council, only 72% of all doctoral degrees handed out by American universities in 1986 went to American citizens, down from more than 83% two decades ago. For some fields, the drop was more pronounced. In engineering, for example, the share of Ph.Ds awarded to Americans dipped from more than 73% in 1966 to slightly under 41% last year.

The numbers suggest increasing classroom contact between foreign-born graduate students and home-grown undergraduates.

Some critics of the new law say that racism and resistance to the unfamiliar is behind the rash of student complaints. “You have a certain attitude around here that everything’s supposed to be homogenized--white bread,” said Lynda McCann, a student government official at the Urbana campus.

There are some indications to support this view. The Northern Star, the De Kalb student newspaper, ran an editorial page cartoon earlier this month depicting an instructor dressed like a Sikh lecturing to a class. “Gibberish, gibberish, gibberish, any kvestions class?” read the caption.

And, in interviews for this story with more than a dozen students who complained about “Asian” teachers, not one could give the specific nationality of the instructor in question.

But others familiar with the controversy say student concerns cannot be so easily dismissed.

Lynne Waldeland, Northern’s assistant provost and a member of a new faculty panel assigned to monitor oral proficiency levels of instructors, said a tighter job market has forced students to become more competitive and resentful of anything they see as an impediment to their progress.

‘More Grade Conscious’

“Certainly students are visibly more grade conscious,” Waldeland said. “The question of English proficiency gets tied in with the difficulty of the subject matter. Students already are anxious about whether they will succeed.”

Educators say some complaints about language problems are really about cultural differences. Teaching assistants from Asia, where rote instruction is standard, often do not understand that they have to field questions from students, said Laura Hahn, who teaches oral communications classes for international students at Urbana.

“Often they talk too fast or they don’t give examples when they speak,” she said. “Some of them don’t understand they’re expected to interact with students in the classroom.”

Although the new law is aimed primarily at graduate students, it applies to tenured faculty as well. That concerns many professors who see it as a legislative intrusion on academic freedom.

“We’re certainly aware that some states have interfered in curricula matters,” said Kenneth E. Anderson, president of the Illinois Conference of the American Assn. of University Professors, which lobbied against the bill. “We’ve been sensitive to the censorship issues of books and libraries, sensitive to the creationism issues that have gone on in some states, so we were really worried about a negative precedent.”

Give Students Muscle

Subhash Jani, who heads a faculty union chapter at Western Illinois University, worried that the law could give students the muscle to intimidate foreign teachers by ridiculing their communications skills.

“It could give students a chance to bonk the faculty,” said Jani, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in India. “If someone chooses not to understand, it could really hurt.”

Some school officials admit that past screening of foreign applicants for posts as teaching assistants has often been inadequate. In many cases, applicants have been hired for the classroom solely on the basis of written submissions.

But the new law has already led to some change. Last year, nine of the 350 foreign teaching assistants at Urbana were removed because of language problems, Hahn said. Before the current fall semester, the school held a weeklong seminar for foreign instructors who were coached not only on flaws in their speech but also on how to interact with American students. However, attendance was voluntary and only 30 graduate students--mostly Asians--took part.

At Northern, future applicants for graduate teaching posts will be required to pass a standardized test for oral proficiency developed by the Princeton, N. J.-based Educational Testing Service.

Graduate students from abroad seem to be split over the fairness of the new law. “It hurts the education of the U.S. in general if you want to put constraints on us,” said Yousef Golshani, a 28-year-old Iranian immigrant majoring in physics at Northern. “The biggest reason students complain is not because they can’t understand us but because they are not familiar with the subject.”

But Zhao Gia, 25, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at Northern, said the pressure brought on by the law might force him to improve. “It make me more better with English,” said Gia, a Chinese citizen who learned English while an undergraduate at Beijing University.

Sitting the other day in a physics lab taught by two Northern graduate students--one Israeli and one Chinese--sophomore Mike Malone preached patience as the ultimate answer to the problem. “It’s just a little tough to understand what they’re saying at first but most of them write the stuff on the board anyway,” he said. “It just takes awhile before you can understand what words they’re saying. After awhile you get used to it.”

Researcher Wendy Leopold contributed to this story.