cultural diversity, [it] would appear to encourage bigotry, racism, and
discrimination” (ibid.).
In the end, the school board voted down the petition quite resoundingly,
but whether or not this was out of conviction of the wrongness of the
proposal or the fact that the State Attorney General had pointed out that it
would violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, is unclear. After the issue
settled, a number of questions had yet to be answered. Commentators
observed that the parents feared not so much that the teachers would be
incomprehensible, but that their children would pick up the teacher’s
accent.
In linguistic terms, this fear has no foundation. Children learn their
phonologies first from their families and then from their peers, and that
process is largely finished by the time they get to school. Phonetics and
phonology do not pass from adult to children like viruses. A teacher
provides a language role model, certainly, but of a different type: with
schooling the lexicon and stylistic repertoire expands, but these are
additions to the basic structure or the grammar of language, which is well
established by age 6. In terms of the Sound House analogy used in Chapter
3 of this book, a child has already constructed a Sound House by the time
they enter school. If any major remodeling is done (and it can be done at
this age), the moving of walls or the addition of a staircase, it is done out
of wanting to imitate the Sound Houses of other children. In contrast, the
stylistic effects of certain grammatical strategies and lexical items might
be seen as interior decorating with drapes and carpets, fabrics and colors,
and will be greatly affected by the acquisition of literacy and hence by
interaction with the teacher. Accent is not an issue; communicative
effectiveness may be, but that is true whatever the native language of the
teacher.
While these fears are easily addressed, the underlying issues remain.
There is considerable resistance in this country to teachers with foreign
accents, and nowhere is that resistance so loudly voiced as in the
university setting. Most large research universities with graduate
programs employ graduate students to teach, or assist in teaching, large
introductory courses in their areas of expertise and scholarship. This is
both a reasonable part of the training of future teachers, and an economic
necessity in larger institutions. Many of these graduate students come
from outside the U.S., and speak English as a second language and with an
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