The practice of international teaching assistant (ITA) training across US institutions has been centred around a traditional model of native speakerism that expects ITAs to acquire the American communication paradigm through pre-made pronunciation and comprehension drills and exercises. Such practice tends to isolate the teaching of listening, speaking, and pronunciation from ITAs’ profound academic background, linguistic competence, and agency. This paper reports on an empowering ITA training curriculum that personalizes and professionalizes learning for international young scholars by promoting their accountability, responsibility, decision-making, and agency. Rather than approaching ITA training from traditional repeat-after-me pronunciation exercises and instructor-centred lectures, our approach leads to vital strides in ITAs becoming confident users of English with tools they need in their future academic endeavours. The curriculum also prepares them for academic success by creating a community of ITAs who learn through using compelling and professionally meaningful topics and materials.

This article examines the uses of English in the multilingual cityscape of Tehran, the capital city of Iran. Drawing from photographic data of 400 publicly visible signs in Tehran, this study aims to understand the various ways in which English, as both a linguistic and cultural resource, operates in tandem with emergent Iranian cultural practices in the context of globalization, especially in relation to the centrality of Persianness to contemporary Iranian national identity. The article, in addition to offering a sociolinguistic history and contemporary portrait of English in Iran, demonstrates how English is used not only to index Western cultural influences and ideals but also how English is relocalized in accordance with the local communicative needs of contemporary Iranians in Tehran. We refer to this phenomenon as the Persianization of English, in which English operates in a discursive field delinked from its indexes to Western culture.

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