ACCENTtuate the positive

Editor's Notes

1. This will be up when student are coming in. It doesn’t need to be included in the presentation.
2. There are three questions. They’re all multiple choice. You can answer by raising your hand
3. Those who said B are correct. Often you’ll have a lecture a couple of times a week by your professor combined with discussion sections or labs taught by a teaching assistant. In this way you get a chance to learn in a smaller setting from young scholars who know what it’s like to also be a student.
4. If you said B you’re right again! Teaching assistants are graduate students from top schools all over the world. They’re here working on their doctoral degrees, engaged in research and teaching undergraduate classes. They’re among the best and brightest around the world.
5. This time if you said C you’d be right. Many iTAs have studied English since kindergarten. Many come from countries where English is the official language. Now ,it’s not exactly the same sounding English as many of us speak here. All of the Englishes (and by the way linguists talk about “world Englishes” not just English as a single entity.) are a little different. Just as accents and slang vary in the US and many Minnesotans have their very own specific sound they also vary from country to country. English sounds different in England, Scotland, South Africa, India, Australia, Singapore) than it does here. So your iTAs are well schooled in English and speak it in a somewhat different way than you do.
6. So here’s a story of an experiment conducted at another university by a linguist. Students were randomly assigned to one of two classrooms. In each room students heard a brief physics presentation while looking at a picture of the instructor.
7. After the presentation students were asked a few comprehension questions and a few questions about their ratings of the instructor. And what happened? Students in Group A had higher scores on the questions than the Students in Group B. Both groups however rated their instructors as equally good teachers. What happened? Have we got a problem here? Well, here’s another piece of information we need…..
8. The real speaker of the taped lecture was this person – someone from Ohio US. It was not the person show to Group A or the person shown to Group B. The speaker to both groups was the same person!
9. If you expect to have trouble comprehending, you probably will. If you don’t presume you will have trouble, you probably won’t.
10. A couple of weeks
11. Research shows you adjust after over time to your TAs accent….
12. You need global skills; the U’g goal is to help you to acquire them