Allophile

...now: must be "accent-less" in AZ if you're going to teach...

As if AZ's public image in the rest of the country weren't bad enough already,
here's something else:

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Arizona Goes After Teachers With Accents: If not 'fluent,' they can't teach English learners 
    (from this article on newser.com)
 
       Arizona is already under fire for its controversial new immigration law, and now this: Schools in the state are being forced to fire or reassign some teachers who speak English with an accent. Teachers who aren’t deemed fluent can’t be in classrooms where students are still learning English, meaning many veteran teachers are taking classes to improve their English—and if that doesn’t work, facing a move to a higher grade where English learners are fewer; about 12.5% of the state's public-school students are considered "English Language Learners."

       Some of the pronunciation problems the Department of Education notes: violet is “biolet” and think is “tink.” While one principal agrees “teachers should speak grammatically correct English,” she doesn’t see why accents should be punished. “This is just one more indication of the incredible anti-immigrant sentiment in the state,” one professor tells the Wall Street Journal. Ironically, Arizona hired hundreds of Spanish-speaking teachers, many of them recruited from Latin America, in the 1990s to teach bilingual education.

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Hmm.....
So, who gets to decide how much accent, and what type of accent, is 'too much'?

When I moved to GA during my elementary school years, it took me several months to finally be able to systematically and effortlessly decipher my teachers' southern accents.
So--would they not be able to teach in AZ today?

On my drive home from work today, this commentary on NPR about AZ's new accent-targeting policy caught my ear...Listen to it and see what you think.

Intuitively, as a language-teacher myself, I know that good pronunciation is imperative on the part of a teacher...but with such a wide variety of naturally occuring and comprehensible accents, it's a slippery slope, once an agency takes it upon itself to be a 'speech-judge'--a slippery slope leading to institutionalized approval of racism and prejudice...


For more information, here's a recent Wall Street Journal article about this topic.

Watch what you say and how you say it, evidently...

Is the AZ Dept. of Education going to have to start a state-wide "My Fair Lady"-style crackdown? Good-intentions, perhaps, but TERRIBLE p.r....(Mississippi, Alabama--relax a bit, while AZ takes over as 'national-butt-of-joke'-state.)

And again--the slippery slope...
We need to add 'accentism' to our vocabulary of possible ways to discriminate, no?


Ah, Arizona: I love the landscape, climate, food...
...but alas--the human, political element; ay, there's the rub....


The saguaros are blooming now.
Enjoy. Just be careful how you pronounce...