The English Tug of War

In Yoruba class last week, our instructor Tayo posed a question to us: What challenges have you faced with friends and colleagues who are Nigerian? Inevitably, the topic of English pronunciation came up. On a daily basis, we find ourselves unable to understand our own language in basic conversation. Whether it is pronunciation (which part of the word is emphasized) or cadence (which part of the sentence is emphasized), this unlikely barrier causes miscommunication and lack of understanding in even the simplest of situations.

As our class discussed the challenges of this Nigerian-American English tug of war, Tayo relayed to us an interesting story. During his grade school years, often teachers from Western or European countries would come in to teach various subjects. Armed with their expert approaches to pedagogy, and of course their various English accents, these teachers were responsible for what the students learned...and Tayo did not understand a word of it. Their accents were so different from his that he desperately copied everything the teacher wrote on the board just to stay afloat.

Tayo's experience is not an isolated case, as most current and former university students can attest to; however, his experience is different in one key way - it was his responsibility to understand his "Western" teacher, not the teacher's responsibility to acclimate accentually for the Nigerian students.

It occurred to me how often American university students shed their own responsibility to understand when placed in similar situations. We blame unintelligible accents for bad grades, or complain we must learn an accent in addition to the course material. Somehow the sole expectation for acclimation is placed on the non-American speaker.

After class, I shared these somewhat troublesome thoughts with Tayo. "Thanks be to God," was his response. "We come from different races, from different backgrounds, from different countries, and yet it is still you and me." He pointed to me, the whites of his eyes speckled with traces of red sleeplessness, but he continued with intensity. "We must communicate to understand each other, and that is our God-given gift." And with this ability comes responsibility - to communicate, to understand, and to meet one another halfway.