What are you saying?

For this action project, we were assigned to write a spot story. We couldn't cover a spot story from seating from our desk, so we had to attend a local events. Once we attended the, we had to  craft a spot story worth publishing. Spot news are news reports of events as they occur. The purpose of this action project was to report on an event. I learned about the nut graph, which is a paragraph that explains the news value of the story. Also, I learned about the inverted pyramid, a metaphor used by journalists to illustrate how information should be structures or prioritized (lead, body, and tail).

What are the dynamics that can creates failure in a STEM class? "I have no idea of what's going during most of the lectures. He is very knowledgeable on the topic, but I don't understand him. It's a double edged sword. I am majoring in Biology and everyone's always talking about how in the Science department, there's so many foreign teachers and it's so hard to understand them. A lot of people disappeared after the first class," said a student in my Biology 121 course, which took place on Tuesday at Harold Washington City College in Chicago. Complaints such as the one above are common among undergraduates students who encounter international instructors in their classes. "Did you hear what he just said," is commonly whispered during my Biology class. Remarks such as the ones above have attracted ire of media, students and lawmakers for years.

The preponderance of Non-Native English speakers, with "thick " accents in STEM courses leads to some undergraduates to drop these subjects altogether. Thks trend is especially worrisome given the U.S's dire need to produce more STEM employees in order to secure its economic vitality in the future.

In 2001, according to the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology, 38.0% of engineering faculty members in U.S. institution of higher education were foreign born, as were 35% of medical scientists, including faculty, and 29% of mathematics science faculty. These facts shouldn't be surprising because foreign-born scientists receive more advanced degrees than their native counterparts.

This is a multifaceted issue and this story is trying to offers a multifaceted approach to exploring the linguistic and social foundations of the problem. "He doesn't understand our rights to ask questions. I think it's also a cultural issue," said another of my classmates. Under students analysis, the problem stems from a linguistic factor (accent misunderstanding), which is a legitimate concern. If students were more exposed to nonstandard English accents. this problem have never existed, but faculties are of course also at fault. "If only he could lose the accent, that would make class a lot easier," this quote was said by everyone interviewed. This "make the accent" go away attitude/mentality fails to account students' role in creating the issue. Being a Non-Native English speaker myself, I can testify that losing an accent is hard work and that my fellow Non-Native English speakers and I would love to do so in order for the "where are you from?" questions would stop, but we it's a struggle. Several studies of student's attitudes have suggested that student renounce responsibility in their participation for poor classroom communication.

"In an especially revealing study, Rubin (1992) played a lecture audiotape for two groups of students, with one group viewing a photograph of a Caucasian lecturer and another viewing an Asian lecturer (both being told that their lecturer was the one pictured). The “Asian” group rated the lecturer as significantly more accented and performed significantly worse on comprehension tasks, despite the fact that both groups heard the same lecture, recorded by a native English speaker from Ohio. In other words, the visual cue to ethnicity was sufficient to make students hear a native speaker as nonnative, and this misconception alone was sufficient to undermine students’ listening comprehension," (Closing the Communication gap between Undergraduates and international Faculty).

An accent is a distinctive mode of pronunciation of a language, especially one associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class. Since the textbooks are written in English, reading them and emailing your professors would be extremely helpful. If you email your professor, his response will not have an accent. After all America is a melting pot, so we should all be willing to listen to anyone who sounds different from what we are used to.

Side notes-Observations:

• As I look around the room, a cluster of students are imitating the professors accents.

Works Cited:

• Elizabeth Redden. "New Report Shows Dependence of U.S. Graduate Programs on Foreign Students. Inside Higher Ed." New Report Shows Dependence of U.S. Graduate Programs on Foreign Students. Inside Higher Ed. N.p., 12 July 2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2015. <https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/12/new-report-shows-dependence-us-graduate-programs-foreign-students>. 
• - Villarreal, Dan. Closing the Communication Gap Between Undergraduates and International Faculty (n.d.): n. pag. 24 Jan. 2012/2013. Web. 25 Oct. 2015.