International teaching assistants at universities: A research agenda

Abstract

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.

Facilitating factors in cultivating diverse online communities of practice: a case of international teaching assistants during the COVID-19 crisis

“…These unexpected changes to UNCU's semester due to COVID-19 likely played a significant role in the responses of the post-survey data. Nonetheless, in answering the research sub-question regarding ITAs' self-perceptions in areas commonly identified as being of concern in previous literature (Li et al, 2011;Gorsuch, 2016;Smith and Khawaja, 2011;Sherry et al, 2010), a preliminary statistical review yields interesting findings to be used for indicative purposes only.…”

“…Unfortunately, various studies outline American undergraduates' negative attitudes toward ITAs. They are often viewed as having linguistic inadequacies (Li et al, 2011;Gorsuch, 2016) and receive lower student evaluations compared to American TAs (Manohar and Appiah, 2015). Work by Meyer and Mao (2015) demonstrates that American students also perceive ITAs as creating classroom environments that are less desirable than those developed by American TAs.…”

“…This case study investigates facilitating factors in cultivating a virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) that is both linguistically and culturally diverse, and its role, if any, in benefiting international teachings assistants (ITAs) at a university on the northeast coast of the United States (UNCU), particularly as ongoing social, linguistic and pedagogical support. Despite their growing presence in US institutions, ITAs are perceived negatively compared to their American-born counterparts (Li at al., 2011;Gorsuch, 2016;Manohar and Appiah, 2015) and experience overwhelming amounts of distress in their transition into US campus life Facilitating factors in cultivating diverse CoP…”

How EFL College Learners Perceive CBI Experience

“…In a case study with a Chinese biology international teaching assistant (ITA) who was engaged in a team-teaching practicum with a native speaker TA in an undergraduate lab, Gorsuch (2005) found that the ITA engaged in self-vocalization and self-repair while lecturing on content, and during interactions with undergraduates and argued for a broader application of the Output Hypothesis beyond learners' immediate responses to interlocutors' non-comprehension in that the act of teaching might … push ITAs into communicating their ideas with greater than ordinary care in order to be comprehensible (Gorsuch, 2016).…”

“…Therefore, the output hypothesis states that "language production is necessary because it forces learners to move beyond semantic processing of language during comprehension and focuses their attention toward syntactic use of language" (Kim, 2017, p. 127), as well as making themselves more comprehensible to their interlocutors as observed in Gorsuch (2016). Thus, output tasks and opportunities should be given and the learners need to be pushed to use the L2 in a productive mode, for example, speaking (Wen, 2018).…”