Do students ever struggle to follow lectures because of accents or spoken English?
With UK, US, and European universities becoming increasingly international, it’s common to have classrooms where students and professors come from very different language backgrounds. A student may understand the subject perfectly well but still struggle to follow a lecture in real time because of an unfamiliar accent, speaking pace, pronunciation, or simply the amount of information being delivered verbally. Sometimes that means missing parts of a lecture or seminar, relying on slides and recordings afterwards, asking classmates for clarification, or spending extra time trying to work out what was said. In other cases, students may not say anything at all and quietly fall behind.
Have you experienced this with your students, and what has actually helped in your classes? Do you feel the support currently available, such as recordings, captions, transcripts or lecture notes, genuinely solves the problem?
I'd especially like to hear from professors who teach large lectures, seminars, or courses with a lot of international students.