WASHINGTON-- A new study on how well students learn second languages from teachers with accents suggests Arizona may be making a mistake by trying to remove heavily accented Hispanic teachers from classrooms filled with Hispanics trying to learn English.

School districts in Arizona are under orders from the state Department of Education to remove teachers who speak English with a very heavy accent (and/or whose speech is ungrammatical) from such classrooms.

Officials say they want students who don't know much English to have teachers who can best model how to speak the language.

According to a new research study in Israel, students learn a second language better from a teacher who speaks with the same accent as they do.

The study, published in the Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, said the students have an easier time with the material. They don't have to spend time trying to understand the English in a different accent.

According to one of the report's authors, psychology professor Zohar Eviatar, the concentration a student would have to summon to understand English in a different accent is considerably greater than if the student was a native English speaker.

In Arizona, that would mean that Hispanic kids studying English would learn better from teachers with Spanish accents.

The research, conducted at the University of Haifa, has implications not only for second-language acquisition but also for how well students learn new subjects, Eviatar said.

The study was done by researchers from different backgrounds. Raphiq Ibrahim is an Israeli Arab with an Arabic accent; Mark Leikin hails from the former Soviet Union and speaks with a Russian accent; Eviatar is a fluently bilingual Hebrew-English speaker.

The team was both personally and professionally curious to know more about the effect of an accent.

Sixty participants age 18 to 26 were chosen. Twenty were native Hebrew speakers, 20 were from the former Soviet Union and 20 were Israeli Arabs who had started learning Hebrew at about 7.

Researchers recorded Hebrew phrases, saying the last word using one of four accents: Hebrew, Arabic, Russian or English. The students were then tested to see how long it took them to recognize the Hebrew word.

 According to the Innovation News Service, they found Hebrew speakers could decipher Hebrew words adequately regardless of the accent, but the Russian and Arabic speakers needed more time to understand the words presented in an accent foreign to theirs.

The study suggests English taught to Mexican students as a second language, for example, can be taught just as well by a Mexican teacher speaking English as by a native-born American.

"If you are an Arab, you would understand English better if taught by a native Arab English teacher," Eviatar said.

"If you have a Spanish accent and your teacher has a Chinese accent, it will be much harder for you to concentrate on your studies," he said. "It's best to learn from a teacher who teaches with a majority accent �� the accent of the language being spoken or an accent like your own. If not, it's an added burden for the student."