"It seemed like a good opportunity for me to learn something about our population and also give the incoming class a chance to learn something about each other, just by listening to each other," said linguistics professor Keith Johnson, who is leading the experiment.
Freshmen and transfer students are recording the phrase “Go Bears!” in English via the Web, a shout-out to Berkeley sports teams. Students will also record five mouth-stretching sentences, including: "She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year." They then read an arithmetic problem in their native tongues, which could total about 50 languages.
"Go Bears!"
After two years and perhaps again after four, students will be asked to make new recordings to determine whether being at Berkeley homogenized their accents or pushed them into distinctive speech subgroups, Johnson said.
Well, I'm no linguistics professor, but I would say this: If you are talking about foreign students who came to the US at college age, they will probably always have some degree of an accent. There is a difference between correct pronunciation (which teachers can help students correct) and an accent. To acquire a native accent generally requires learning the language at pre-puberty age-in other words, being exposed extensively to the target language as a child-preferably in-country. The other alternate is to take expensive accent reduction classes.
But if you follow the politically-correct road (which universities love to do), the students will likely wind up pigeon-holed into those sub-groups in the name of diversity. In that case, who knows what their recordings will sound like in four years.
PS: The UC Regents just voted to raise student tuitions another 18%. That ought to pay for this project.
3 comments:
By definition, a Ph.D degree denotes that the recipient has added something new to the sum total of human knowledge.
There was a time when this was such a high standard that colleges considered themselves lucky to get a Ph.D on the faculty. Generally anyone with a Master's degree could find a teaching job.
Now, it appears that there is a shortage of new frontiers to cross which add anything significant to human knowledge. But the Ph.D degree is awarded so widely, for such miniscule contributions, that it is impossible to get a tenured position without one.
Problem is that in most humanities programs, by the time you get that PHD, you have been educated out of the last ounce of common sense you were born with.
Well, common sense has been around for a long time. To GET a Ph.D in the humanities, you have to come up with a new way of thinking. Having done so, you have to promulgate that this new thinking is The Truth that was previously unknown or unrecognized.
I once asked a man with a Ph.D in psychology "Isn't it true that every time a Ph.D is awarded in psychology, a new mental illness enters the world?" He agreed that was about right.
Maybe there shouldn't be any Ph.D's in the humanities or social sciences. It is pretty much all a matter of opinion.
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