scholarly journals The effects of a technology-supported training system on second language use strategies for international teaching assistants

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shenghua Zha
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Teaching Assistants ◽  
Training System ◽  
International Teaching Assistants ◽  
International Teaching

International teaching assistants at universities: A research agenda

2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greta Gorsuch
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Teaching Assistants ◽  
Second Language Learners ◽  
International Teaching Assistants ◽  
Undergraduate Teaching ◽  
Undergraduate Level ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
International Teaching ◽  
Output Hypothesis

International teaching assistants (ITAs) are Indian, Chinese, Korean, Turkish, etc. international students who have been admitted to graduate study at universities in the U.S.A. and Canada, and are being supported as instructors of undergraduate-level classes and labs in biology, chemistry, physics, and math. For the past 30 years, the number of ITAs has been increasing, and many departments at universities have come to rely largely on ITAs to cover their undergraduate teaching needs. As high-intermediate and low-advanced second language learners who must use their second language for professional purposes, ITAs face linguistic, social, professional, and cultural challenges. This is a learner population that deserves more attention, as I hope to establish here with this presentation of six research tasks. I have organized proposed research projects in such a way as to increase readers’ familiarity with this little publicized field, and also to relate the projects to different contexts of inquiry. By ‘contexts’ I mean ‘who is asking what and for what reasons.’ The two contexts of inquiry are: (1) Established areas of ITA program concern, including acquisition of fluency, prosody, and vocabulary; and (2) Working with ‘outside’ theories, such as the Output Hypothesis, and deliberate practice theory.

An applied genre analysis of office hours consultations

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-326 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathon Reinhardt
Keyword(s):  
Curriculum Design ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Teaching Assistants ◽  
English For Academic Purposes ◽  
International Teaching Assistants ◽  
Corpus Analysis ◽  
Analytic Approach ◽  
Genre Analysis ◽  
Learner Corpus ◽  
International Teaching

This paper describes an examination of academic consultation discourse using an applied genre analytic approach (Bhatia 2002a) to inform English for academic purposes curriculum design and to contribute to interactional pragmatics and politeness research. The project employed a series of complementary genre and corpus-informed analyses, namely contextual (Tribble 2002), phase (Agar 1985), and interactional moves analysis (Swales 1990) focused on the use of framing (e.g. Goffman 1974), in conjunction with contrastive corpus analysis (Granger 1998). Data for the analyses originated in the office hours sub-corpus of MICASE (Simpson et al. 2002), and a spoken learner corpus of international teaching assistants in training (Reinhardt 2010). Results are interpreted using a model of directive language use in academic consultation discourse that considers appeals to choice and involvement as complementary rather than conflated. The genre of office hours emerges from the negotiated textualization of directive moves, framed around directive constructions using interactional politeness appeals.

Intelligibility Rating of L2 Speech Pre- and Postintervention

1989 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 515-521 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Perlmutter
Keyword(s):  
International Students ◽  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Teaching Assistants ◽  
International Teaching Assistants ◽  
State University ◽  
Green State ◽  
Bowling Green State University ◽  
International Teaching ◽  
Intelligibility Ratings

As a result of a recent law passed in Ohio, a program was designed to improve the oral intelligibility of International Teaching Assistants at Bowling Green State University. To evaluate the efficacy of the training, naive undergraduate students were asked to evaluate the pre- and postrecorded speech samples of the international students, both in terms of intelligibility of the sample and the identification of the topic of the monologue. Analysis showed a significant improvement in the intelligibility ratings between pre- and posttraining samples. Further, the average number of correct subject matter identifications was shown to increase, while the average number of incorrect judgments decreased significantly from pre- to posttraining evaluations.

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