Rebecca Oreto, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

Looney, S. D., & Bhalla, S. (Eds.). (2019). A transdisciplinary approach to international teaching assistants: Perspectives from applied linguistics. Multilingual Matters.

Research into the field of international teaching assistants (ITAs) has grown exponentially since the early 1990s, but it tends to be spread out in variety of fields—testing and assessment, teaching and learning, pronunciation, intercultural studies, discourse studies, higher education administration, and sociolinguistics, to name a few. Though there are many studies of how to best work with ITAs, they are often hard to find because of the diversity of fields in which they are published. In addition, because ITA practitioners tend to come from the field of language teaching and TESOL, they are often unaware of relevant work from other fields.

Enter Stephen Looney and Shereen Bhalla with their book, A Transdisciplinary Approach to International Teaching Assistants: Perspectives from Applied Linguistics. This book is a call for ITAs to be included in a movement in applied linguistics toward transdisciplinarity. The editors outline what is meant by transdisciplinarity, the history of ITA research, and how ITAs can be included in this discipline. They are influenced by a paper published in 2016 by the Douglas Fir Group, a group of scholars who work with a variety of approaches in second language acquisition and who were interested in building a transdisciplinary approach in second language acquisition research. This approach allows ITA researchers and other practitioners to move away from a deficiency model of ITA to a perspective of ITAs as “multilingual, skilled, migrant professionals who participate in and are discursively constructed through various participant frameworks, modalities and activities” (Looney & Bhalla, 2019, p. 1). An ITA who struggles with English in a U.S. setting also may be a skilled researcher whose work is critical to the success of their research team, or may be a proficient teacher who has come to do research work in a new environment. Using a deficiency model to guide the practice and learning of English is extremely limiting to their development. It does not take into account the critical underpinnings of their academic and professional backgrounds, nor does it take into account the context in which they are and will be working professionally.

Transdisciplinarity encourages ITA practitioners to use models that build in the varying identities of the ITAs, the influence of larger institutions on the demands placed on the ITA, and the values of the cultures that ITAs come from and are currently living in. These models allow practitioners to frame ITA work around concepts like audience awareness and expectations, strategic and discourse competence, and viability of communication skills.

The transdisciplinary model takes into account the micro, meso, and macrolevels of ITA practice (Looney & Bhalla, 2019, p. 11). This multifaceted approach outlines the variety of contexts that ITAs exist in. The microlevel includes stakeholders, interactional repertoires, and recurring institutional contexts. The meso-level takes into account communities of practice and social identities. The macrolevel looks at the values—political, educational, linguistic, cultural, economic—of the ITA context. Each of the chapters works within one of these levels.

At the microlevel, Lucy Pickering examines how prosody affects ITA discourse. Stephen Looney looks at how conversation analysis can help ITA practitioners develop a model of what kind of repertoires ITAs need to be successful. Shaio-Yun Chiang uses videotaped interactions between ITAs and students to examine authority and identity in their interactions.

At the meso-level, Okim Kang and Meghan Moran examine how different cross-cultural programs affect attitudes of undergraduate students to ITAs. Shereen Bhalla details the process of how South Asian ITAs navigate the complexities in their new communities of practice. Jing Wei examines whether training for ITA test raters designed to raise awareness of differences in World Englishes affects rater attitudes and bias.

At the macro level, Linda Harklau and James Coda perform groundbreaking work in examining the historical and current methods of international student recruitment as it affects ITAs and the political and economic forces that have come into play during this time period. In order to best promote the importance and quality of ITA practice within the university, Greta Gorsuch explains how to use course logic to outline an ITA class, so that the teacher/program head can give an overview of the roles of the participants in the class (e.g., teacher, course teaching assistants, ITA students), outline the goals and outcomes of the class, and show how the activities of the class lead to the stated goals.

The book ends with a call to action from Looney that outlines five priorities that he feels are critical to advancing ITA practice:

1. grounding ITA practice and policy in research
2. including interactional repertoires in ITA pedagogical materials
3. ITA practitioners engaging with ITAs’ communities of practice
4. including undergraduates in ITA training and assessment
5. involving ITAs in ITA preparation

These priorities are well chosen and eminently sensible. The field of ITA training and testing can only become stronger by following these priorities, and indeed many ITA programs center at least one or more of these priorities in their practice.

However, as a long-time ITA practitioner, I can see why these very practical and powerful priorities often fall to the wayside. Problems arise because many ITA programs are understaffed or rely on adjuncts to teach classes; many ITA practitioners are language teachers, not researchers, and thus are not skilled in translating research into classroom practice; there is a dearth of classroom materials for ITAs; and perhaps most importantly, there is a small number of tenure-track and tenured faculty in the field of ITA, which means that ITA as a field lacks powerful advocacy from firsthand practitioners. Change for ITA practice has to come from within the field, but also from the university and wider academic community as well, and in many universities, ITA practitioners may not be in the place to drive that change. However, it is up to ITA practitioners to continually push for the importance of their work and their essential place in the university ecosystem. This book gives a strong call to action for those who want to advocate for change in ITA practice, points out areas where change can be most salient, and serves up a vocabulary and way to talk about that change.