“Come join us, and lose your accent!” : Accent Modification Courses as Hierarchization of International Student

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ “Come join us, and lose your accent!” : Accent Modification Courses as Hierarchization of International Student © Journal of International Students 2020 Published version Ennser-Kananen, Johanna; Halonen, Mia; Saarinen, Taina Ennser-Kananen, J., Halonen, M., & Saarinen, T. (2021). “Come join us, and lose your accent!” : Accent Modification Courses as Hierarchization of International Student. Journal of International Students, 11(2), 322-340. https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v11i2.1640 2021 322 Peer-Reviewed Article © Journal of International Students Volume 11, Issue 2 (2021), pp. 322-340 ISSN: 2162-3104 (Print), 2166-3750 (Online) doi: 10.32674/jis.v11i2.1640 ojed.org/jis “Come Join Us and Lose Your Accent!” Accent Modification Courses as Hierarchization of International Students Johanna Ennser-Kananen Mia Halonen Taina Saarinen University of Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT In this article, we examine the hierarchization of international students by bringing together perspectives of linguistic legitimacy and language ideologies. Our data stems from 26 accent reduction or accent modification course descriptions and websites from U.S. universities. Based on their analysis, we discuss the sociopolitical implications of the phenomenon of these courses for international students and the ways in which language-based, particularly accentbased, arguments are used to create or reinforce different categories of students. We argue that while international students are presented as having different kinds of “comprehensibility problems” that accent modification and reduction courses are claimed to remedy, the seemingly linguistic arguments that are used for marketing do not hold. Rather, what is presented as an accent issue actually seems to be an ideological one, drawing on the students’ ethnic or geographical origins, and thereby racializing the question of language proficiency. Keywords: accent, international study, language ideology, student hierarchization This course is designed for high-level non-native speakers of English who want to modify their accent and increase their confidence in a variety of speaking situations. —College A Journal of International Students 323 In order to study internationally, students generally need to have command of the language(s) of their hosting institutions. In English-speaking countries, language skills are often measured by standardized tests such as the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) or International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which are used to measure certain aspects of the linguistic performance of nonnative English-speakers. 1 The notion of “high-level” skills in the extract above from a U.S.-based college refers to such test scores. The tests have, however, been problematized for ethicality, validity, washback effects, and cultural bias (e.g., McNamara & Roever, 2006), and even high-level nonnative English-speaking international students are commonly offered so-called accent reduction (AR) or accent modification (AM) courses in order to ease their problems in adjusting to their studies and the community. The above extract from College A highlights the paradox we want to analyze and discuss in this article: While international students have demonstrated high-level skills in English, they are still presented as needing to modify their accent. AM or AR courses are a phenomenon familiar in professional, medical, and educational sectors (see for instance, Blommaert, 2009; Ramjattan, 2019), as foreign accents are believed to interfere with the success of international professionals and students. Although these courses claim to boost students’ study and labor market success, there is evidence that they reinscribe racial inequalities (Ramjattan, 2019). While there is research on professional and business AM/AR courses (Blommaert, 2009; Ramjattan, 2019), no work exists that investigates such courses in the context of international study. This article fills this gap by analyzing AM/AR courses from the perspective of language ideologies and their repercussions for the hierarchization of international students. Ideologies of accent allow us a window into social power dynamics and ethnic hierarchizations that are implicated in the discourses on the websites that constitute our data. With this, we address de Wit’s (2020) concern in the 10th Anniversary Series essay of the Journal of International Students, as he called for a more ethical and qualitative approach in order to understand new dimensions of international study. LITERATURE REVIEW According to recent estimates, approximately one in four international students (1.1. million) study in the United States (Zong & Batalova, 2018). We follow the general definition by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2013) of international students as those having crossed borders for the purpose of study, who are not residents of their country of study, or who have received their secondary education in another country. From 2016– 2017, China was the top country of origin of these students, making up 33% of the total, followed by India (17%), South Korea (5%), and Saudi Arabia (5%; 1 Although “nonnative speaker” is a highly problematic concept, we use it here in order to speak back to data and prior literature on the topic. Journal of International Students 324 Zong & Batalova, 2018). In all, at least two-thirds of international students in the United States came from Asia, another 7% from the Middle East, and 4% from Latin America (Statista, 2019). Our literature review focuses on language issues of international study and the role AM/AR may have in addressing them. The Paradox of High Language Skills and AM Courses The problems international students face in the United States are commonly summarized as “adapting to a new culture, English language problems, financial problems and lack of understanding from the broader university community” (Sherry et al., 2010, p. 33). This has led to recommendations for pedagogical development of the staff in receiving institutions (Wolf & Phung, 2019). However, Lee and Rice (2007) have pointed out that not all problems international students face can and should be understood as matters of individual adjustment. Rather, based on a case study of one large U.S. university, they suggested that neo-racism (i.e., discrimination based on proxies for race such as culture and national origin) was a key problem international students experienced, surfacing as feelings of discomfort, direct and indirect confrontations, and verbal abuse. While students from Europe, Canada, and New Zealand reported nothing of the kind, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Asian students experienced “considerable discrimination” (Lee & Rice, 2007, p. 393), pointing to racism as the underlying problem. Language, particularly accent, is were bias often surfaces. For instance, Yeo et al. (2019) observed that Asian American students reported being racialized based on their perceived English proficiency, prompting them to speak “exaggeratedly [...] well-formed English” to signal belonging to the group of domestic students (p. 52). Interestingly, a discrepancy exists between perceived and tested language skills. For instance, Xu (1991) found that while standardized TOEFL test scores did not predict students’ perceived academic difficulty significantly, self-rated proficiency in English was the most significant predictor. Thus, even though language tests are required for entry, previous research does not support a straightforward link between test results and academic success. We want to examine this apparent discrepancy a bit closer. Language arguments are rarely about language alone. Similarly, accent is not only a linguistic but also a sociocultural phenomenon that has been the focus of a lot of research in recent years (e.g., Lippi-Green, 2012; Moyer, 2013). Accent does not refer to so-called intelligibility (‘understandability’) of the speech, that is, formal language proficiency. Instead, it refers to features that do not affect meaning in a way that vocabulary, prepositions, or idiomatic expressions do. Accent refers to the listeners’ perception of how closely the pronunciation approaches a so-called phonetic norm of a native speaker (Flege, 1988). Even though native speech accents also vary, foreign accent is perceptually so fundamental that humans are able to detect one from very early age on, even in a single word played backwards or in a language one does not know (Kinzler, 2008; Major, 2007). The experience of immediate recognition of hearing others speak one’s own first language with a foreign accent is familiar, relatable, and intuitive. Journal of International Students 325 This does not, however, make foreign accented speech unintelligible. On the contrary, it has been shown that native-speaking listeners are easily and rapidly able to adapt to different foreign accents when exposed to them; comprehensibility is not only collaborative but also learnable (Bradlow & Bent, 2008). However, what foreign accented speech might affect is the listeners’ willingness to understand, that is, comprehensibility. Comprehensibility is a mediation concept between understanding speech (intelligibility) and stance toward a speaker. It refers to the perceived ease or difficulty of understanding a speaker and is thus per definition always a two-way street. In other words, comprehension does not hinge solely on the speaker; rather, all the participants are responsible for the communicative process (Munro & Derwing, 1999; Trofimovich & Isaacs, 2012). Research (e.g., Major et al., 2005) documents clearly that some accents are perceived as more legitimate in particular contexts than others and that these perceptions are not ideologically innocent. For instance, a study by Wang et al. (2018) on communication between international and local students in the United States showed that local students viewed international students with mild accents as more intelligent and educated than those with stronger accents, thus illustrating that perceived accentedness is neither socially nor ideologically neutral. A focus on accents oftentimes serves as a basis for stereotyping and hierarchizing students and categorizing speakers as groups assumed to share a general geographical origin (e.g., Asia) and a particular accent (e.g., Asian accent). Focus on language thus becomes indexical of country of origin or ethnicity. As Blommaert (2009) noted in his analysis of web-based AM courses, AM is “not about learning American English, but learning to sound like an American” (pp. 245–246). Linguistic Legitimacy and the Mismatch Between Comprehensibility and Accent As high proficiency in English, as documented by standardized tests, is a prerequisite for being accepted to study at U.S. institutions, the students who are targeted by AM/AR courses already are proficient in English. How can speakers have high proficiency and “incomprehensible” accents at the same time? At the point at which the listener thinks they hear a so-called wrong pronunciation, they have already understood. In more academic terms, paradoxically, comprehensibility precedes the claimed necessity of AR/AM courses. In order to understand the role that accents play in the experiences of international students, we outline how language practices are socially perceived, that is, what is considered a legitimate linguistic practice in a given context. The concept of linguistic legitimacy can be traced back to Bourdieu (1977) who defined a “legitimate language” as … uttered by a legitimate speaker, i.e. by the appropriate person … ; uttered in a legitimate situation, i.e. on the appropriate market … and addressed to legitimate receivers; … [i.e.] formulated in the legitimate Journal of International Students 326 phonological and syntactic forms (what linguists call grammaticalness), except when transgressing these norms is part of the legitimate definition of the legitimate producer. (p. 650, emphasis removed) Building on the Bourdieuian foundations, Norton (2000) examined and theorized the limited “right to speak” of adult English learners in Canada, whose high investment in language learning did not always transfer to being perceived as legitimate speakers. Relatedly, Ennser-Kananen’s (2018) work with multilingual German foreign language learners in the United States underlined the fluid nature of linguistic legitimacy, defined as “discursively constructed acceptance or validation for their language use” (p. 18). When AM/AR courses advertise an expected improvement of comprehension, what may on the surface be described as a problem of speech is in fact an issue related to its speakers, who are for various reasons positioned as illegitimate communicators. AM courses operate on the assumption that some accents are more legitimate than others and substantiate this by describing nonnative accents as interfering with their speakers’ comprehensibility and ultimately their social integration and professional credibility. However, (in)comprehensibility is never ideologically neutral, but a complex relationship between linguistic and ethnoracial categorymaking (Rosa, 2019). Despite comprehensibility being a two-way street, in practice it is usually shouldered by those who are considered foreign to a particular context. For instance, while international students have been shown to be concerned about understanding local accents (Marginson et al., 2010), the AM/AR courses in our data encouraged students to lose their accent rather than the teachers to adjust theirs in order to be more comprehensible. How are such misinterpretations of comprehensibility used as an efficient market bait for AM/AR courses? First, as argued above, even though accents rarely affect intelligibility, they are usually immediately recognized. Therefore, accents do also provide an easy link to the assumed (ethnic, national, linguistic) background of the speaker. As Creese and Kambere (2002) argued, perceptions of accents are racializing as they are “embodied markers of immigration” (p. 10). Second, accent tends to convey a certain sociopolitical innocence that allows the concept to be used apparently unproblematically. According to Nguyen (1993), as labor market discrimination in the United States based on sex, race, color, national origin, and religion became regulated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, accent has become a common ground for discrimination of nonnative English-speakers. The notion of comprehensibility, including non-accentedness, has thus taken the place of a racist gatekeeper in labor and education markets by constructing accents as ideologically neutral rather than as intrinsically tied to the speakers and their origins. Journal of International Students 327 METHOD Research Design Our research design is descriptive, explorative, and phenomenon-based. Our different expertise (linguistic legitimacy, language ideologies, higher education internationalization) were critical for the design, as our collaborative engagement provided a certain amount of researcher triangulation when identifying themes and conducting the analysis. As researchers, we position ourselves within a critical paradigm. We thus subscribe to a research-based understanding of higher education as socially stratified and language use as functional, culturally shaped, and communicatively situated. In keeping with a critical approach to language in education, we want to make inconsistencies, inaccuracies, inequalities, and hidden agendas in real-world data visible. Research Questions Given the scarcity of literature that discusses AM courses from a higher education policy and language ideological perspective, our exploratory and analytical efforts aimed at understanding the role of language, the constructed legitimacy of languages and accents, and the process of student hierarchization in course descriptions of AM/AR courses at U.S. higher education institutions. The following research questions motivated our study: 1. What does the promotion of AM/AR courses tell us about the role of languages (and by proxy their speakers) in the internationalization of U.S. higher education? What view of language is promoted in the course descriptions? 2. What accents or varieties are described as valued and legitimate and how is this done? In which way do these descriptions intersect with other social factors, particularly race and ethnicity? 3. What hierarchizations of international students are constructed through the ways in which some accents are presented? Who is the imagined target audience? Through this, we invite a discussion around the sociopolitical implications of the phenomenon in international student mobility, and show that AM/AR courses are not primarily about language skills but use (intentionally or not) the notion of language ideologically to construct hierarchies based on nationality and ethnicity. Data Data for this study consists of texts from 26 websites of U.S.-based higher education institutions that, at the time of data collection, in the Spring 2018 semester, offered AM/AR courses. While the commercial market (often directed Journal of International Students 328 at professionals in fields such as business, education, or medicine) is another significant context for such courses (Ramjattan, 2019), this study focuses on higher education. The selection of data from college websites was a result of a Google search for strings “accent reduction course” and “accent modification course.” The websites for the courses we analyzed are located at departments of speech pathology, communication and communication disorders, and health, or were situated within continuing education and professional development departments. We focused on the course descriptions on these websites that had the twofold purpose of advertising the courses and informing readers about their content, goals, materials, design, costs, and prerequisites. Because of our interest in a systemic phenomenon rather than the individual institutions, we anonymized our data. Data Analysis As a first step, we conducted a qualitative content analysis (Mayring, 2000) of our data with a combination of inductive and deductive strategies. Inductively, we identified themes that emerged in the course of multiple in-depth readings across different data sources. Our deductive strategies included scanning for data that related to concepts from our literature resources, such as comprehensibility or legitimacy. Both strategies were combined to identify key themes in the texts. As a next step, we selected shorter excerpts and phrases from our data for a closer critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003) to understand their discursive, sociopolitical, and historical layers of meaning more deeply. For instance, we took a closer look at names for presented varieties of English, such as “Standard American English” to unpack their meaning and implications. We paid special attention to medical terms (“diagnosis,” “therapy”) and how they were used to describe accents. To understand hierarchization, we focused on direct and indirect hierarchizations of the target group students as others (i.e., “foreign,” “nonnative,” etc). Last, we put our identified themes into connection, usually by mapping them visually on a whiteboard, with the goal of understanding them in relation to each other and to bigger societal discourses. This process produced answers to our research questions. RESULTS Our analyses produced responses to the research questions that we organized into three themes: images of language and accent, homogenization, and hierarchization of targeted (imagined) speakers. Journal of International Students 329 Images of Language and Accent: Language as Building Blocks and Accent as Pathology Language and language skills are presented as one major source of problems that international students identify as standing in the way of their academic success and of integrating in the higher education community. However, rather than addressing language(s) as a whole, these websites focus on one component of it, accent. In response to our first research question, we examined the understanding of language that undergirds the content of the course websites. Accents and Language as Building Blocks A recurring pattern that was prominent on numerous websites was the notion of accent, language, and the learning process as consisting of independent or isolated pieces that are to be acquired in a particular consecutive order. Similar to a set of building blocks, language acquisition or AM is presented happening as a process of putting together individual parts (e.g., vowels, consonants, stress, intonation, etc.) until a particular desired construction is completed. This also applies to language itself, which seems to be viewed as separated from accent, so that the accent block can be simply added onto the previous language blocks that the participants have acquired earlier. For instance, course websites may state the following: Topics covered include a quick, basic, and useful introduction to where and how speech sounds are produced; individual sounds of American English in isolation, with close attention to typically problematic consonants and vowels; difficult combinations of sounds; word stress; intonation; and pronunciation differences between formal and casual speech. —College B This extract illustrates the notion of accent as made up of individual sounds that can be learned and taught (quickly and) “in isolation.” Other bricks of accent include “combinations of sounds,” “word stress,” and “intonation.” The description of some of these linguistic building blocks as “typically problematic” or “difficult” raises questions about the implied target audience, which is constructed in opposition to users of “American English” (see also next subsection on homogenization). It further invites problematizations of what constitutes “difficult” language or accent features in this context and for whom. A similar targeted variety of English is referred to in the next extract, which also provides examples for “particular sounds” and “melodies” that the respective course addresses: ACT involves direct instruction and models for articulation (the way sounds are produced) and prosody (the melody of speech) in Mainstream American English (MAE). It provides opportunities to practice learned skills in a variety of communication settings and situations (e.g., presentations, interviews, ordering food), as well as direct feedback on performance from the Journal of International Students 336 the representation of these others or so-called foreigners as a monolithic group, what becomes clear in this extract is the problem of “foreignness.” While, on the surface, AM/AR courses aim to solve language-related problems, neither international nor foreign are linguistic categories. CONCLUSION In this article, we have analyzed texts from 26 university websites that promote AR/AM courses. We asked what view of language and accent they promote, what mechanisms of language ideologies are at work, and how the target audience of these courses is perceived. While international students are presented as having different kinds of comprehensibility problems, the seemingly linguistic arguments that the courses are marketed with are not valid. We recognize that the desire to reduce a so-called foreign accent is urgent to many speakers, and the modification of an accent may even produce an experience of empowerment and success. Our goal here is not to dismiss these experiences. However, what is identified as a language issue in the context of these courses is actually an ideological one, drawing on the students’ ethnic or geographical origins and consequently racializing the question of language skills. This not merely erases recent foundational work in the field of applied linguistics (e.g., Creese & Kambere, 2002; Rosa, 2019), but is especially problematic for the target audience of AM/AR courses—international students— who are set up for failure through such an approach. The idealized native-like speech promoted in the courses but only imagined in reality is a misleading premise that ignores the vast variation among varieties of Englishes as well as individual variation stemming from regional, socioeconomical, and other differences. The homogenized view on language promotes a deficit perspective on nonnative speakers, who will perpetually lag behind an obscure norm. This approach disregards the complex, and often contradictory, reality of learning trajectories, multilingual and multimodal meaning making and communication, and the role of social (status, power, gender, class, race, ability, etc.) and societal (globalization, neoliberalism, technologization, etc.) factors, all of which constantly permeate and shape language use, as well as the role of language users. Combined with requirements to take high-stakes standardized tests (which are an equity issue per se) and a perpetuation of harmful native-speakerist ideologies, this creates the perfect storm of failure for international students, who are led to believe that their experienced failure in becoming a full member of the academic community is a personal rather than a systemic one. Discourses of pathologization reinforce this setup as they position international students as deficient in a process of AM, to which only speech specialists hold the key. Creating such a relationship of dependency robs students of their agency and negates their skills and experiences. Pathologizing accent isolates questions of comprehensibility even more from social and societal processes and simultaneously makes the issues not just individual but intrinsic to the students. Journal of International Students 337 The targeted audience, international students, are not the only ones who are depicted in simplistic ways in our data. The imagined goals of AM/AR are fictional representations, simplifying diversity and variation in ways that go against current research. Additionally, variation is also erased from languages and accents within the community of native speakers, problematically positioned as role models. By constructing imaginary languages, variations, and acronyms, the native speaker community is presented as one monolithic unit that is the source and owner of one monolithic accent. The homogenization of language and speakers as native and nonnative is an ideal condition for juxtaposition and othering. With the (fictional) groups described as clear cut and uniform, hierarchies of us and them are easy to establish and reproduce with the help of discursive strategies that create opposition and othering. Within this power game, we also found some evidence of attempts to carve out spaces for the building and expressing of cultural identities. However, given their effort to restrict cultural uniqueness to particular (unidentified) times and spaces (presumably outside of accent) and their tendency to exoticize and essentialize cultural identities, they can only be described as limited and limiting. If the linguistic arguments for AM/AR courses do not hold, what then, is behind this effort to advertise these courses? Our analysis indicated that not all students were imagined or addressed in the same way. While native speakers of American English were presented as accent-free, socially and academically successful students, potential participants for the courses were depicted as deficient and struggling in their academic lives. While the talk of students as nonnative, international, and foreign is void of any explicit mention of race or ethnicity, the majority of international students in the United States are from racialized groups (Statista, 2019), meaning that AR or modification may, in the end, become an exercise in reducing or modifying non-White race and ethnicity. International students face problems that are diverse and related to a variety of socioeconomic factors (Lee & Rice, 2007; Sherry et al., 2010); a focus on socalled accent oversimplifies and misrepresents their experiences. The motivations behind these courses are beyond the scope of our study. However, if higher education contexts promote such discourses, intentionally or not, native speakers may learn very quickly that it is not their responsibility to establish successful communication with international students. The message to international students is, in turn, that there is almost no limit to the expense and effort they have to invest in order to fit in. While none of this may be the intention of higher education policy makers, it is nonetheless a likely consequence. If such courses are to be organized, we suggest their focus should not be on accent but, more broadly, on successful communication in linguistically and culturally diverse academic contexts. In order to actively challenge native speakerism, racism, and other means of hierarchization that permeate predominantly White institutions, it is critical for such courses to call in all participants of an academic community, particularly those who consider their communication skills to be standard, unproblematic, or neutral. The issue to be tackled here is not the accents but the systemic othering that AM/AR courses reproduce. Journal of International Students 338 REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1991). 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(1991). The impact of English-language proficiency on international graduate students' perceived academic difficulty. Research in Higher Education, 32(5), 557–570. Yeo, H. T., Mendenhall, R., Harwood, S. A., & Huntt, M. B. (2019). Asian international student and Asian American student: Mistaken identity and racial microaggression. Journal of International Students, 9(1), 44–70. Zong, J., & Batalova, J. (2018). International students in the United States. Retrieved May 9, 2018, from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/international-students-united-states JOHANNA ENNSER-KANANEN, PhD, is an Academy of Finland research fellow at the Department of Language and Communication Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Her current work focuses on linguistically and culturally sustaining education for migrant teachers and anti-oppressive (language) pedagogies for migrant students, particularly those with refugee experience. Email: johanna.f.ennser-[email protected] MIA HALONEN, PhD, is a senior researcher at the Centre for Applied Language Studies, University of Jyväskylä. Her recent areas of research include sociophonetics and historical sociolinguistics as well as language attitudes and stereotyping related to language ideologies and policies. Email: mia.m.hal[email protected] TAINA SAARINEN, PhD, is a research professor at the Finnish Institute for Educational Research, University of Jyväskylä. Her major research interests lie in the area of language ideologies and language policies in higher education. Email: [email protected]