What happens when the teacher can't speak English?

John Gravois:

On the phone from Fargo, N.D., State Rep. Bette Grande's voice rings with clarity. "Colleges are a business," she says in a starched Midwestern accent. "When we put research as our No. 1 focus, we forgot the student," she says. "We got ourselves all turned around."

Ms. Grande could be talking about any of the ills plaguing a modern university -- drops in per-student spending, tuition increases, or maybe the lack of face time with professors. But she has something much more contentious in mind.

She wants her state's university system to do something about the fact that its students can't understand what the heck their foreign-born instructors are saying.

Late in January, Ms. Grande proposed a bill in the North Dakota legislature to prod public institutions of higher education in precisely that direction. Under her bill, if a student complained in writing that his or her instructor did not "speak English clearly and with good pronunciation," that student would then be entitled to withdraw from the class with no academic or financial penalty -- and would even get a refund.

Further, if 10 percent of the students in a class came forward with such complaints, the university would be obliged to move the instructor into a "nonteaching position," thus losing that instructor's classroom labor.

Almost as soon as the bill went public, Ms. Grande realized she had touched a nerve. Calls and e-mail messages poured in from all over North Dakota and from as far away as Florida and Arizona. In nearly a decade as a legislator, Ms. Grande had never attracted such a prodigious and impassioned response.

That's probably because anyone who has studied mathematics, engineering, computer science, or economics at an American university in the past decade is likely to have harbored the frustrations Ms. Grande's bill aims to soothe. With rising international enrollments in graduate programs, classroom language barriers have become both a public hobbyhorse and a subject for scholarly study in their own right. In more than a dozen states, legislatures have passed laws to set English-language standards for international teaching assistants. But Ms. Grande's bill was designed to send a stronger message: If you can't speak the language clearly, get out of the classroom.

Something like this happened to me once when I was taking a computer class. It was the first session and our instructor was from India and his accent made it difficult for us to understand what he was saying. As the class progressed and his accent did not become any easier to understand we all looked at each other in embarrassment and confusion. Finally, a woman who was a Chinese immigrant pointed out to the instructor that none of us could understand his accent. Unfortunately, it did little to improve the situation and so I dropped the course after a couple of sessions.