What would you do if a college professor had a strong accent and you could not understand him or her?

I think you should learn how to construct a sentence with a subject and a verb (!) before you criticize the way someone else talks.
then when you’re done with that, you should read English with an Accent, by Rossina Lipp-Greene.

In some university undergraduate classes, the graduate assistants do the lectures. It seemed that most of them were language challenged.

Thank you! Much better! Okay, now I suggest you read the book!

I actually had that happen in my college days. I ended up cancelling the class and retaking it. He was prejudice against white women and I was the only white women in his class. I was apparently the butt of many jokes and didn’t really realize it because I never understood him.

That’s easy! Drop the class and take the course at a regional campus. Usually smaller classes and Genuine English speaking professors. At least thats the way it is at OSU

This always seems to happen with statistics classes, and what my friends do is just ask for copies of the notes from the professor and seek outside tutoring (it’s usually free on campus for intro courses) if they can’t grasp the subject matter.

An ability to communicate clearly in the language of instruction would seem to be as important a tool in the professor’s skill set as content-area knowledge. An accent is one thing; incomprehensible speech is another. If the teacher really cannot be understood, I think the student has a fair (not “fare”) cause for complaint.

@La_chica_gomela, I think this must be the book you’re referring to. The synopsis indicates that it’s about language discrimination. I’m sure that is a real experience and a situation that ought to be taken seriously in our multicultural society; but surely if a teacher’s speech cannot be understood by English-speaking students in an English-speaking university, it is not about prejudice and discrimination. Do you truly feel that it is up to each student to master the particular traits of speech of one non-native speaker and bridge the gap in understanding?

I think you should keep trying to understand him. The reality of life in the United States is that we have many people here with accents, so you better learn to understand them if you want to be successful. If your future supervisors, co-workers, etc., have accents, you can’t “cancel and try again next semester.” Hell, the world is full of people with accents. You won’t be able to function unless you learn to decipher other accents. They took the time to learn English; learning their accent will take much less effort and time than learning another language.

I fight about this with a relative of mine all the time; whenever her daughter gets bad grades in a class, she goes to the school and complains that the teacher with an accent can’t be understood.

My ECON prof was like that when I attended a traditional university. He has a thick African accent. I simply stopped going to class. Not the best idea, but it’s late, an I have no real solution to your problem.

What would I do, or what have I done? I’ve had about 7 professors with this problem, and there’s no way around it. Sure, it would be nice if you could have a professor who spoke “perfect” American English, but that’s never going to happen, so don’t hold your breath (or your tuition dollars). I could understand the profs I had the best when I watched their mouth and payed very close attention to what they were saying. It can be done. Seriously. One of my instructors said “corrally” instead of “coriolis”..odd.

Most professors are hired, not for their teaching abilities, but for their research and work in their respective communities. Teaching is a bonus. There is really no way around this in our system of education. Universities want people who will get the most grant money and do the most research and bring the most interest (read: money) to the school. If they can’t teach worth a dime, oh well. So, for you: just tough it out and have a good laugh.

I had a Java programming teacher who had a very strong Italian accent. I was scratching my head for quite a while wondering what an Inazed for loop was. (I had difficulty understanding a lot of his words, but that’s the only one I recall at the moment). I ended up failing the class. His accent was only part of the issue. He also didn’t really teach.

On the other hand! My Econ teacher was from Romania, he had a very apparent accent, but it was easy enough to understand him. I ended up taking a class again with him a semester later. One of the coolest teachers I’ve ever had.

I would drop the class. If I can’t even understand a professor how am I supposed to learn or get anything out of going to class? There’s a reason we’re not all teaching ourselves…teachers are supposed to be instructive and helpful.

Way back when we had to take ansi C and Cobol, our instructor was very easy to understand and he always said. there are three ways to code. The Right way, The Wrong way and the Cowboy way. your enhanced for loop falls neatly into the cowboy category as did recursive function calls ( they were new then. I am a living fossil.

@drdoombot, I think that is an unrealistic expectation. To understand a person with an accent, you have to develop and cultivate a kind of filter that allows you to translate the sound patterns you hear into sound patterns you understand. We may already have little personal libraries of filters for the regional accents within our own language groups and countries, but even they can be challenging. Americans of some regions of the U.S. can have difficulty with other regions, and native speakers of English of different national flavors can really stump one another.

It is also true that some people have a natural faculty for building and using those filters and others have not, and that some of us have a better ear for certain languages than others.

There are more than 6000 languages in the world, each with its own characteristic sound patterns that carry over when the users speak another language. Even if we were just talking about a few dozen or a hundred major languages, you are still suggesting that any given individual has an obligation to master translation filters for each of them because they may encounter individuals of that many different origins in the social and working world. Why exactly do you think the burden is on the native speakers of a language to adapt to the huge number of possible variants coming at us from elsewhere?

We are not speaking here of the enlightened self-interest of being prepared to meet , live, and work with people of widely varied backgrounds. We are talking about a person who has contracted to perform a service for a fee—namely, delivering knowledge and facilitating learning in a student—and who lacks a basic tool for communication, to wit, language fluency sufficient for effective communication. If a student has 5 professors of different cultural origins, should the student have to master what is effectively 5 different languages in order to acquire knowledge from those teachers?

If a school is going to demand a certain aptitude as a precondition of admission, should there not likewise be a qualification for instructors that establishes a minimal ability to transcend language barriers? What is the difference between lecturing in unintelligible English and not lecturing in English at all? Would you consider it acceptable if a professor walked into a classroom in an American college (and not a course in a foreign language) and started lecturing in Finnish or Gujarati or Japanese? What is the difference?

I have friends and co-workers of many different language backgrounds, and I make an effort to communicate effectively with all of them. I have no prejudice against people whose speech is different from mine. But as a medical patient I want to work with medical staff who can clearly convey to me information about my condition and treatment and accurate, understandable guidance for my care. Is that not a reasonable and wise expectation? This is a special case and not, say, talking with a neighbor or even discussing software specifications with a co-worker. I am paying for medical consultation and expect and need to understand what is said to me. Is this not more like the student who is paying for an education than it is like collaborating in the workplace or just being sociable with other members of our community? Among our peers we can go back and forth as much as need be to achieve understanding, but in a lecture hall the student is at the mercy of the lecturer and has no recourse.

I have a very hard time with language, even in English, but strong accents are impossible for me. I would try to get a written transcript, or at least recording to be able to play back the inaudible parts.

Maybe write a letter to the university board in order to at least make him aware of the problem. Maybe if he pays more attention, he’ll be easier to understand, some people simply don’t articulate well without them being aware of it. And the university can do some supervision from time to time to see if the problem occurs again.

Another option – if you just miss parts of the sentences – would be to record the lectures, it might become clear if you can listen to it again. I’m using a Livescribe pen to record trainings at work, it’s really useful since you can link audio and notes. Maybe share the investment with some classmates and share the notes and recordings too. Here’s some more info: http://www.cleverandeasy.com/Multimedia/livescribe-pulse-smartpen-link-notes-and-audio-recording.html

@SheWasAll_ that is so funny. The prof I had with the thickest accent in college, I graduated back in ‘90, was a statistics prof.

To follow up on what @drdoombot said, I think it is important to work on being able to understand people with accents. If you cannot understand the prof drop the class. But, my stat prof I mentioned above had a very thick accent, I had no problem understanding him, but many in the class complained like crazy about him speaking with an accent and that he was difficult to understand. I had grown up outside of NYC and D.C. and it was not that I was familiar with his particular accent, but I was not dismissive when people had an accent, and I am a very active listener, I watch the persons face when they talk, I am not with my head down doodling. I am not saying the person who asked the question does that in class, just giving some hints on what works for me. I went to school at Michigan State, which was a very “apple pie” campus at the time. Most of the kids grew up never having to listen to accents, in fact pretty much everyone I meet from MI to this day thinks they have no accent, and it is the rest of the US that does; I am talking about among Americans. In the end, almost everybody did stay in the class and was able to understand the prof, they just complained a lot about his accent, and seemed annoyed that the university hires people who cannot speak English well, etc. His English was perfect, he just had an accent. But, as I said, if the particular situation is that you really cannot understand the prof I would drop the class.

Don’t bother talking to the university board. If the school is halfway decent they have the students do evaluations at the end of the semester anyway so they know about the language problem.

This isn’t a discrimination thing. It’s a you can’t understand your professor thing. There was someone like that in my department when I attended college. I just avoided his class. Thankfully that was something I could easily do.

You shouldn’t force yourself to sit through a class with a professor you don’t like (for whatever reason) if you don’t have to.

I would make an appointment and talk to the department chair of the discipline you are taking the course in. Ask him or her to do some investigating to find out if many others have had or are having the same problem. Then ask for a solution – either a transfer out of the course, TA sessions to go over the lectures or the provision of lecture notes before each class. While it is important to strive to understand people who speak English as a second language, if you are making a sincere effort to understand the teacher of a course you need to take and you and others can’t do it, some reasonable solutions should be found by the university.

This happened with a math professor I had early on. No one could understand him. Thankfully he made up a syllabus so we all at least had an idea of what was expected of us.
It’s still early in the semester, you could transfer if you speak to a counselor.

My one prof is arabic… my class is full of white yuppies that for the most part haven’t really been outside of new england…. he writes a lot of stuff down lol….