The Grand Canyon of discrimination

George W. Bush couldn’t even teach English in Arizona under the new rules that ban public school English teachers from having any noticeable accent or who use ungrammatical speech patterns. Besides the well-established linguistic fact that it is impossible for anyone to not have an accent, the law will have very real and negative effects on current teachers.

Arizona has an immigrant population that is much higher than the national norm, with approximately 150,000 of its 1.2 million public-school students being classified as English-language learners.

Removing English teachers who have Spanish accents will render the English education of these mostly Spanish-speaking immigrants much more challenging.
 
It is important for students of any subject to be able to relate to and understand their instructors. Bilingual English teachers are a helpful resource for immigrant students. Eliminating them simply because they are accented is dangerous to these students’ education.

In the 1990s, Arizona hired hundreds of Spanish-speaking teachers to encourage and enhance bilingual education. Many of these teachers will have to be unjustly fired under the new law, putting the English education of their students in peril.

Those who are learning English as a second language often find it easier to learn English if they have a teacher who also speaks their first language. Second-language acquisition is always a difficult thing, but it certainly helps to have someone teaching you whom you understand.

Additionally, this law will severely limit the students’ exposure to diversity in Arizona classrooms. Diversity should be an integral part of all students’ education, and sheltering students from it will debilitate their cultural awareness and exposure.
The potential implications of this law are far-reaching.

Anyone who speaks any language has an accent, as it is linguistically impossible not to have one. Because of this, the new law could be used to pick and choose which accents are more “acceptable” than others, which will likely pose more of a threat to teachers in minority populations, like in the inner-city or in immigrant communities.

Lingo, slang and cultural dialects are important aspects of communication, cultural identity and geographic location. It is arbitrary to eliminate teachers who use these important linguistic tools to better communicate and relate to their students.

Of course it makes perfect sense to expect teachers of English to be fluent in the language, but arbitrarily deciding that speakers of certain aspects or dialects of English (including the accent or dialect of individuals who have acquired English as a second language) should be banned from teaching is unfair and unnecessary. The potential for this rule to be biased against minority populations is simply nauseating.

Arizona is establishing a trend of passing xenophobic and irrational laws, and this one certainly deserves to be considered a part of that. It makes no linguistic or common sense to fire English teachers simply because they are accented or occasionally use ungrammatical sentence structures.

It is important for English teachers to relate to their non-native English-speaking students, and this relationship outweighs the ability to speak English without any trace of an accent or occasional grammatical error.