If you don’t know where you are going, you might not get there.
Yogi Berra

After working with international teaching assistants (ITAs) for many years, the flow of the ITA training process can become second nature for many ITA trainers. It’s easy to forget about the complex set of steps involved in mastering the level of fluency needed by ITAs to communicate to learners. At the same time, the process is often unclear or hidden from the ITAs themselves, their advisors, and the academic departments. So it resonated with me when I found a learning framework that captured so clearly the stages involved in mastering academic teaching fluency.

In How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, Ambrose, Bridges, Lovett, DiPietro, and Norman (2010) point out that mastery of any complex skill set (e.g., communicating to learners as an ITA) typically progresses through several clear developmental stages. Having a better understanding of the level of mastery linked to each stage of learning can help ITA trainers plan more effective training and have more realistic expectations (Ambrose et al., 2010). In addition, if we have a framework to better communicate this process, we can help faculty advisors, graduate departments, and the ITAs themselves have more realistic expectations about the process required to develop the fluency needed to interact with students.

Sprague and Stuart’s (2000) model characterizes the progression from novice to mastery by looking at two key factors: competence and consciousness. The progression includes four developmental stages.

Let’s look at how each of the stages map onto the ITA training process.

Stage I: Unconscious Incompetence

Many of the graduate students we meet in our ITA training program come to us with very unrealistic perceptions about their current command of academic fluency. As international students who have sufficient background to be admitted to a graduate program in the United States, they can be considered fluent on a number of scales. For example, they probably had strong TOEFL/IELTS scores and were successful (maybe even top in the class) in the ESL programs they attended in their home countries. In addition, they are likely doing well in their graduate work, mastering materials in lectures, and interacting sufficiently with their advisors. These potential ITAs may feel a sense of English mastery, but they often lack sufficient experience teaching or communicating with people outside of their field to be able to recognize what skills they do not have. To compound the problem, they may even get feedback from their advisor, office mates, or friends about how great their English is.

The ITA Test: A Wake-Up Call

Taking the ITA test (or getting feedback in an ITA training class) can be a shock for many students. Those who cannot pass the test, or who score lower than they expected, suddenly become aware of what they cannot do, of gaps in their language, and of how much more is going to be expected of them. This “moment of truth” will, hopefully, lead them to the next stage: conscious incompetence.

Stage II: Conscious Incompetence

In this stage students are now aware of the gaps in their mastery of teaching fluency and, hopefully, are beginning to understand what skills they will need to master in order to move to the next level. In our program, we help foster this awareness by investing time in feedback appointments for each student who takes the ITA test. Students are required to return for a 30-minute appointment during which we explain areas of strength and weakness, review the feedback from each rater, and then advise the students on the specific workshops at our center that would be most effective in helping them improve.

Having detailed proficiency descriptors for each score on the ITA test has been crucial for this stage. These descriptors make it clear to students (and to their academic departments) what language tasks they are capable of at each level of proficiency and what skills they will need to develop in order to move to the next level. We have worked hard to develop descriptors that clearly depict the competency linked to each score.

Challenges

• Students may resist or argue (I don’t need to reword; My advisor understands me well!; My friends say I am fluent; The test is bad).
• Students may become discouraged and want to give up now that they realize what they cannot do. The trainer needs to help students approach training with the belief that they can progress; clear communication (not native-like mastery) is an attainable goal.

Approach

• Help students understand the gaps and accept the need to change.
• Provide a variety of models of clear and authentic academic English (e.g., online videos of faculty, TED talks); make sure students know how to use these models (e.g., through guided handouts and hands-on training in the classroom).
• Provide materials and exercises to help students develop the needed skills (e.g., rewording and simplifying concepts and terms from their field, making clear and concise definitions, developing the language and cultural skills to use examples effectively, using appropriate linking language).
  

At our center we offer a large selection of workshops (5 weeks) and seminars (2 hours) that focus on all of these skills. Students can select the sessions that best meet their needs and schedules.

As students transition to this stage, they start to understand and try out the various language skills deliberately and in isolation (much like a new driver self-consciously and cautiously tries out new skills on the highway). The amount of time spent in this stage varies from student to student (one semester to several years), and it is important for us to acknowledge that some students will not ever transition out of this stage.

Challenge

Students have improved and are now aware of techniques that should be used, but often use these awkwardly and may even overuse them. For example, they may use ineffective rewording (e.g., pipelined architecture; that is, architecture done in a pipelined way), artificial interactions (e.g., I’m going to explain Bayesian Networks. Do you know computers?), or examples that they lack the fluency to implement (e.g., A thermocouple consists of two metal bars. When it gets heat, two metal bars expand together and generate electronic signals due to the resistance difference. For example, tie together a snake who can sustain heat and a polar bear who likes cold. If they are warmed up, the polar bear cannot escape and generates a signal. This is like thermocouple.).

Approach

• Provide ample opportunities for students to practice communicating information to learners (e.g., individual tutoring appointments, giving presentations in class with peer and instructor feedback).
• Provide materials and guidance so that students can improve through daily interactions (e.g., noticing use of teaching language by their professors, websites to model appropriate teaching language in their field). This step is extremely important. Students are surrounded by models of academic English (in lectures, interactions with advisors, YouTube videos on technical issues, TED talks, TV news shows) on a daily basis, but are typically unaware to what aspects of language they should pay attention to and try to copy. Once students are able to tap into this constant stream of input, they can truly begin to make changes in their own language.

Stage IV: Unconscious Competence

Although language may still be nonnative and sometimes awkward, students are now able to easily use the needed language skills while also handling the cognitive load of communicating content to learners. ITAs can now focus on the material and the needs of the learners rather than focusing on language. And the learners can focus on learning rather than trying to decipher the language of or guess the meaning intended by the ITA.

The international graduate students are now able to pass the ITA test; the ITA trainer’s job is done.

References

Ambrose, S., Bridges, M., Lovett, M., DiPietro, M., & Norman, M. (2010). How learning works: 7 research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Sprague, J., & Stuart, D. (2000). The speaker’s handbook. Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt College.

Peggy Allen Heidish is director of the Intercultural Communication Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where she coordinates programs for nonnative-English-speaking students, supervises ITA testing and training, consults with international faculty, works with graduate departments on issues related to international students, and develops workshops to increase cross-cultural understanding on campus.