Arizona to reassign teachers with heavy accents

The Arizona Department of Education is sending evaluators to audit teachers and their English speaking skills to make sure districts are complying with state and federal laws.

Teachers who are not fluent in English, who make grammatical errors while speaking or who have heavy accents will be temporarily reassigned.

"As you expect science teachers to know science, math teachers to know math, you expect a teacher who is teaching the kids English to know English," said Tom Home, state superintendent of public instruction...

The Linguistics Department at the University of Arizona has offered a set of counterpoints:

1) ‘Heavily accented’ speech is not the same as ‘unintelligible’ or ‘ungrammatical’ speech.
2) Speakers with strong foreign accents may nevertheless have mastered grammar and idioms of English as well as native speakers.
3) Teachers whose first language is Spanish may be able to teach English to Spanish‐speaking students better than teachers who don't speak Spanish.
4) Exposure to many different speech styles, dialects and accents helps (and does not harm) the acquisition of a language.
5) It is helpful for all students (English language learners as well as native speakers) to be exposed to foreign‐accented speech as a part of their education.
6) There are many different 'accents' within English that can affect intelligibility, but the policy targets foreign accents and not dialects of English.
7) Communicating to students that foreign accented speech is ‘bad’ or ‘harmful’ is counterproductive to learning, and affirms pre‐existing patterns of linguistic bias and harmful ‘linguistic profiling’.
8) There is no such thing as ‘unaccented’ speech, and so policies aimed at eliminating accented speech from the classroom are paradoxical.

More details and extensive comments at Language Log.