these students ever considered that they might have some work to do in
order to achieve successful communication; in every case, it was seen as
the TA’s responsibility alone.
The next time I taught this course, I spent half an hour in the first
lecture talking about accents in general and foreign accents in particular
and about common-sense ways to resolve difficulties – if difficulties ever
arose. These included asking for clarification in a straightforward but
polite way, requesting that a word or sentence be written on the board,
along with the benefits of patience, open-mindedness and empathy for
those who were now in a situation that the undergraduates might someday
be in themselves, if they were lucky enough to study abroad. That year I
had two disgruntled undergraduates asking to be removed from a
discussion section led by a native Japanese speaker, and both those
individuals had missed the first lecture.
This is, of course, only anecdotal, but others have spent years
researching the elements that cause communication difficulties between
ESL learners and native speakers, from phonetics to ideology. In a
particularly insightful study, Derwing, Rossiter and Munro set out to
“determine whether native speakers’ comprehension of accented speech
can be enhanced through instruction. The experiment involved both cross-
cultural content and explicit instruction in the characteristics of a
particular accent” (Derwing et al. 2002). The study required pre-testing of
comprehension after listening to Vietnamese accented recordings, accent
lessons, cross-cultural communication lessons, and post-comprehension
tests.
The students, all enrolled in a class in the social work program, were
divided at random into three groups: