| Alice Kaplan grew up in Minnesota in the 1960s. In her 1993 book, she tells the story of the development of her unconditional, life-long affiliation with French. Her memoirs begin at the age of eight, when her father, a Jewish lawyer who prosecuted Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, died. Kaplan explains that she felt a deep connection between feeling the loss of her father and feeling different from others in her pursuit of French: ‘Learning French was connected to my father, because French made me absent the way he was absent, and it made me an expert the way he was an expert’ （p.203-4）. She began studying French in grade 5, and at the age of 14 attended a French immersion summer programme in Maine. The two formative experiences, however, were a year abroad in a French-medium school in Switzerland at the age of 15, while still in high school, and another academic year abroad in Bordeaux three years later, while she was a French literature undergraduate. Her interest was always as intense for French culture as it was for the French language: ‘Even in beginning French classes, you know there was a French beyond the everyday, a France of hard talk and intellect’ （p.138）. By the end of the two full-year study abroad experiences, a complete self-identification with the new community and culture had taken place. She later became a French language teacher and eventually completed a doctorate in French. To this day, Kaplan is committed to a life in which both French and English play prominent roles. | 5 10 15 |
| Smoothing the Path from Foreign Lips to American Ears It is a complaint familiar to millions of alumni of research universities: the master’s or doctoral candidate from overseas, employed as a teaching assistant, whose accent is too thick for undergraduate students to penetrate. To help solve this problem, increasingly sophisticated software programs have been developed to analyze and critique speech. One program, NativeAccent, which became available three years ago, has been adopted by more than 100 universities. Briju Thankachan, an Indian graduate student here in instructional technology, has spent hundreds of hours using NativeAccent. The software can isolate hundreds of pronunciation issues and even show animations of how to position parts of the mouth for each sound. “Every morning I would hear him repeating things over and over into the computer, and you could hear him getting better,” said Mr. Thankachan’s wife, Betsy J. Briju, a visiting assistant professor in plant biology. The comprehension problem is far from solved. Even at an institution like Ohio University, with an unusually robust remedial program, undergraduate students say they have run into hard-to-understand teaching assistants. “You get better at understanding after a while, and they’re willing to talk it over again, but it can be hard,” said Karen Martinez, a sophomore from Chicago. The university’s efforts to address the accent problem date to the 1980s. Every foreign student’s command of spoken English is assessed on arrival, and each year about 300 go through the improvement program, part of the linguistics department. In classes, the students learn to break language into individual sounds, forcing them to be aware of how each part of the mouth is positioned to make a particular bit, while instructors contort their faces and touch their tongues to drive home the point. Students take sentences apart to learn rhythm, emphasis, pauses and rising and falling pitch— elements that can convey as much information as words. “Many people come here without having learned intonation at all,” said Lara Wallace, a lecturer in linguistics. “Everything comes out in a flat monotone, which makes an accent even harder to understand.” Students are assigned to practice in computer labs, using the speech analysis software, and — possibly the most unpopular exercise — recording audio or video of themselves speaking. They have to transcribe those recordings verbatim, with every pause, false start, repetition or “um” noted. | 5 10 15 20 25 30 |
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