Many years ago, before cell phones and Wi-Fi were ubiquitous in New York City, the city placed billboards around town exhorting citizens to call a certain number if they discovered a broken payphone. This led to the question of how you could call the number if the payphone was broken, and whether you would still bother to call it if you found a working payphone since you did not need the broken payphone anymore and could be many blocks distant from the broken phone by then, having forgotten the location of the original payphone and the reason for calling in the first place. To paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld and Adam Sandler, who were the ad wizards who came up with this, and whose reality were these billboards designed for?

The billboards are long-gone, and any research on their effectiveness, if ever such research was conducted, is likely sitting in an inaccessible box of archived paper files in an upstate warehouse; yet a similar kind of Zen koan-like situation remains part of reality for many ITAs and the instructors who teach their preparation courses. Consider the fact that students might already have years of experience as TAs at one US graduate institution, and may have even completed undergraduate degrees in the US; yet when they begin work at a new graduate institution, that new school insists on them taking a local ITA training course before they can be approved to work as TAs. This can lead to serious motivation problems with students in ITA courses when combined with their TA work schedules and their already demanding graduate-level studies. The ITA course instructor’s job becomes even more confusing when the students are in fact already working as TAs at the same time that they are taking the ITA training course, for which the goal is to obtain a recommendation to work as an ITA. Trying to manage the circularity of such a situation can lead to a motivational Möbius strip in which you are not sure which way is up, as you ask yourself, “Why are these students here?” and “What is my job as an instructor if they have been through all of this before and their skills are already quite strong?” In this article, I will provide some strategies for taking ownership of these issues and altering the reality of your teaching situation to the demands of your program.

As unpopular as it is to generalize, I have observed that ESL teachers tend to be creative, left-brained humanities experts, and that international graduate students in the US tend to be STEM majors. Certainly, ESL teachers may have STEM backgrounds as well, and conversely ITAs might be enormously creative; but in many cases there exists a disciplinary disconnect between instructors and students. You must not try to resolve this disconnect by pretending to be an authority on subjects with which you are not familiar. Instead, you can use this kind of reversed teaching polarity to your advantage. Throughout the course, have them share teaching examples based on their own disciplines, and if you are not an expert in, say, pharmaceutical nanotechnology, your lack of knowledge will help you more closely emulate that of a neophyte undergraduate student that they would be tasked with teaching. In this way, you can rate the clarity of their explanations more genuinely. For peer feedback, have other students role play as inattentive, inexperienced, or semi-rebellious undergraduates who require extra-clear explanation and pronunciation. Roleplaying may seem more appropriate for lower-level ESL students, but in reality students of all levels may enjoy it, from beginners to working professionals.

With regards to pronunciation, it should remain a key element of any ITA course, even in the most holistically oriented curriculum. Even very experienced TAs who speak quite clearly might be interested further accent reduction. This is an admirable goal, but to sell your ITA course as a mere pronunciation course is not helpful to you or to students, even if the reality is that they perceive the course as such. Though it may seem obvious to advise this, make pronunciation feedback a regular part of each assessment so that students feel their needs are being addressed.

Materials development and assessment can also be difficult for ITA courses, as there are few textbooks for ITA courses on the market. In keeping with the theme of this article, your teaching strategy should be grounded in reality. If your textbook is slightly dated, focus on the perennial principles in it that remain relevant in any time period: discussion of cultural differences between teaching practices in the US and the students’ home countries, pragmatics, formality, and politeness principles, teacher-student rapport. The textbook may have suggested assessments you can use, but keep things reasonable for the students and for yourself. Do not fall into the trap of trying to make the foot fit the shoe by including every suggested assessment in its most laborious iteration simply because it is included in the textbook. If students are performing a certain kind of multi-stage assessment multiple times, e.g. a microteaching presentation, think about every stage of each assignment. Is each stage truly helping you to evaluate their skills? If so, how? If not, why not and how can you change things for maximum efficiency? You would not do this just to cut corners, but rather to streamline the process for student success and minimization of washback.

With so much research having already been conducted on ITA courses and ITA performance within the university context, we have more resources for student success than ever before. If you are encountering difficulty as an instructor of an ITA course, take heart in knowing that many have been down the same road as you and have likely come up with solutions that give everyone a fair chance to succeed. With practical observations and application of new techniques based on research findings, we can even more easily assess the nature of reality for ITAs and their needs in the future.

Steven Mercier is a Senior Instructor at INTO USF. He has a background as a software trainer, and has lived, studied, and worked on three continents. Currently, he serves as the webmaster for Bay Area Regional TESOL (BART).