Since the late 1970s, an influx of international graduate students began studying at universities across the United States. International teaching assistant (ITA) training programs emerged as these graduate students entered classrooms as teaching assistants and their oral English was perceived negatively by the undergraduate students they instructed. Since then, more than 20 states have passed legislation requiring all incoming international graduate students who will teach courses in the United States to undergo some form of an oral English proficiency exam (see Gevara, 2016; Kaplan, 1989). Those students who do not successfully pass the oral English proficiency exam are required to enroll in an ITA training course or program. With the establishment of these ITA programs, much research since the 1980s has been conducted to investigate a range of domains.

Past Research

Over the past 30 years, ITA research has focused on the following areas of inquiry with their respective contributors: undergraduate student perceptions of ITAs (Plakans, 1997; Hinofotis & Bailey, 1981); assessment, which includes oral English abilities and placement into ITA training programs (Wagner, 2016; Farnsworth, 2014; Halleck & Moder, 1995); discourse demands placed upon teaching assistants in general (Madden & Myers, 1994; Chiang, 2009; Kramsch, 1986; Tyler, 1992); cultural demands that ITAs experience (Gorsuch, 2003); issues of identity (Chiang, 2016; Zheng, 2017); prosody and ITA effectiveness (Pickering, 2001); fluency (Gorsuch, 2011); and the experiences of ITAs in U.S. classrooms (Arshavskaya, 2015). These domains of research have had several curricular implications, which have descended in a top-down fashion into ITA training courses and programs.

Curricular Implications for ITA Programs

Over the years and with this previous research in mind, the ITA training curriculum in general has shifted from focusing on linguistic issues to “a more comprehensive focus on linguistic, pedagogical, and cultural competences” (Zhou, 2009, p. 19). Recognizing this shift from a focus on purely linguistic issues, ITA training courses now encompass and draw upon more comprehensive aspects to language and teaching used in the classrooms, which ITAs will find themselves. As some researchers have noted, although comprehensibility is important, ITA programs should not be focused on achieving language that is considered native-like (Zheng, 2017). As such, ITA programs have increasingly focused on the discourse demands placed upon TAs, such as office hours, lab settings, or classroom teaching (Madden & Myers, 1994). In addition to language content, ITA programs focus on comprehensibility through suprasegmental pronunciation training (Pickering, 2001, Hinofotis & Bailey, 1981). In addition, by focusing on language use rather than linguistic form and drawing on corpus linguistics, many ITA instructors have now presented course content from a corpus-informed language awareness approach (Reinhardt, 2007). ITA programs also include reflective practices that focus on teacher identity and pedagogy; teacher identities are negotiated through reflective practices in the ITA training course (Zheng, 2017). Finally, more broadly, ITA programs focus on the cultural demands of ITAs so that new ITAs can adapt to the cultural norms of their institutions (Gorsuch, 2003). These considerations highlight the fact that ITAs cannot simply be placed into general English as a second language (ESL) courses because traditional ESL courses lack the pedagogical practices and teacher identity training necessary for ITAs.

A Direction for Future Research

Though each aforementioned area of research and its respective contributions has had tremendous value to both ITAs and to ITA programs, they are isolated from examining the development of preservice ITAs within and through particular ITA training programs or courses. In other words, little work has been done to empirically and systematically investigate the practices and programmatic choices made within our own ITA programs and the impact that these choices have on the development and preparation of ITAs who will teach American undergraduate students. It should be noted that it is not our intention to say that researchers and practitioners should halt their investigations of the aforementioned areas of inquiry; rather, a fruitful avenue of future investigation is to provide an in-depth analysis of the programmatic choices made within institutions and the impacts that these choices may (or may not) have on the preservice ITAs enrolled. By providing a thick description of our ITA programs and examining the quality of the interactions between instructors and preservice ITAs, we will be able to see, support, and enhance their professional development (for a similar argument made in language teacher education, see Johnson & Golombek, 2016). In addition, this will allow us to more fully theorize the nature of the mediating factors that promote or hinder ITA development. In this regard, it is essential to systematically investigate what and how ITAs are learning and developing in these courses and how this development (or lack thereof) then informs their interactions with American undergraduate students. By studying the development and progression of ITAs through our courses, ITA programs can be empirically grounded and justified through informed, bottom-up decisions and observations.

Closing Remarks

As previously mentioned, it is our view that current programmatic choices are the result of top-down decisions. That is, decisions as to what to include in ITA training courses have been made through implications of previous research, which is important in its own right. Now, however, it is important to examine how these top-down choices have impacted programs through bottom-up, data-driven observations of classroom interactions. By addressing these research concerns, we will be able to document, investigate, and analyze how programmatic choices may (or may not) facilitate and mediate the development of ITAs through mediated and situated activities (see Johnson & Golombek, 2003). In this vein, we will be able to see how these practices are shaping what is being learned, how what is being taught is being learned by the preservice ITAs, and how to help determine the impact of ITA courses and programs. Finally, through these bottom-up, data-driven investigations and analyses, we can determine what is needed for curriculum design, improvements, and reform within our own contexts.

References

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Chiang, S. (2009). Dealing with communication problems in the instructional interactions between international teaching assistants and American college students. Language and Education, 23(5), 461–478.

Chiang, S. (2016). “This is what you’re talking about?”: Identity negotiation in international

teaching assistants’ instructional interactions with U.S. college students. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education, 15(2), 114–128.

Farnsworth, T. (2014). Assessing the oral English abilities of international teaching assistants in the USA. In A. J. Kunnan (Ed.), The companion to language assessment (pp. 471–483). Chichester, England: Wiley Blackwell.

Gevara, J. R. (2016). Confirming the impact of performance tasks on latent class membership and placement decisions (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Graduate School. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Gorsuch, G. J. (2003). The educational cultures of international teaching assistants and U.S. universities. TESL-EJ, 7(3), 1-17.

Gorsuch, G. J. (2011). Improving speaking fluency for international teaching assistants by increasing input. TESL-EJ, 14(4), 1-25.

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Plakans, B. (1997). Undergraduates’ experiences with and attitudes towards international teaching assistants. TESOL Quarterly, 31(1), 95-119.

Reinhardt, J. S. (2007). Directives usage by ITAs: An applied learner corpus analysis (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from Electronic Theses and Dissertations for Graduate School. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

Tyler, A. (1992). Discourse structure and the perception of incoherence in international teaching assistants’ spoken discourse. TESOL Quarterly, 26(4), 713-729.

Wagner, E. (2016). A study on the use of the TOEFL iBT® test speaking and listening scores for international teaching assistant screening. ETS Research Report Series, No. RR-16-18, 2016:1.

Zheng, X. (2017). Translingual identity as pedagogy: International teaching assistants of English in college composition classrooms. The Modern Language Journal, 101(1), 29-44.

Zhou, J. (2009). What is missing in the international teaching assistants training curriculum? Journal of Faculty Development, 23(2), 19-24.

Michael Amory is a PhD candidate in the Department of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include applying a Vygotskian Sociocultural Theoretical perspective to second language (L2) language teaching and learning, the development of L2 teacher cognition, the theory and practice of L2 teacher education, and utilizing the framework of conversation analysis to analyze classroom interactions and institutional discourse.

Stacy Suhadolc is a lecturer in the Department of Applied Linguistics at The Pennsylvania State University. She teaches ITA and ESL courses. Her research interests include teacher education development, sociocultural approaches to second language teaching, and second language teacher development.