ITAs face many issues when they become instructors at primarily English-speaking institutions. These problems may arise from the teaching assistant’s language skills, cultural differences between instructor and students, or a lack of sufficient teaching experience (Ashavskaya, 2015). It’s essential, therefore, that we support ITAs by giving them a variety of tools that they can readily use in the course of their instruction. One such tool is a ready-to-use structure for explaining important vocabulary words or concepts to students. This is crucial because all teachers must be able to work through material that hasn’t been understood and make it clear to students, regardless of language or teaching proficiency.

While talking to a group of ITAs at a recent workshop, I introduced the need for this skill by mentioning my father: an intelligent, educated engineer who always confused me when he helped me with my high school math homework. His descriptions of concepts that I was supposed to be learning left me scratching my head more often than not because they were often overly complex or filled with anecdotes that were only tangentially related to the topic he was trying to explain. If he had this problem as a native speaker, how could ITAs become competent at such a critical facet of teaching? The following process gives ITAs a formula to use to help master a difficult skill that often puts them on the spot in front of students, when they may start to doubt their English language ability and fall back on technical jargon to save them.

Step 1: Definition

The key to this step is for ITAs to begin with a general idea and then focus in on something more specific. A useful structure for doing this in English is a sentence containing a relative clause, as suggested by Smith, Meyers, and Burkhalter (1992), such as the following:

A (term) is a/an (category) that (defining characteristic).

Categories

In my experience, when deciding on the first term to work on with ITAs, it’s easier to start by using a real-world example instead of jumping into technical jargon immediately. This also helps in that it provides common territory for classes that might contain graduate students from disparate fields.

My go-to example for this activity is a tiger. The ITAs work together on brainstorming various categories that a tiger could be placed into:

• animal
• jungle animal
• big cat
• carnivore
• wild animal
  
  

We then discuss how the category that we choose for our definition depends on what course is being taught; in our oversimplified example, an ITA might use “endangered animal” for a class that focuses on conservation while another ITA teaching a basic zoology class may find “carnivore” to be more appropriate.

After the initial example, the students then work on generating lists of possible categories for everyday objects, ideas, and concepts. After they have finished and compared their lists, the students can try their hand at creating categories for terms in their field or any other academic subject. They might come up with the following, among others:

• law
• process
• equation
• approach
• algorithm
• instrument
  
  

Defining Characteristics

The final part of the definition step is to select a defining characteristic for the term. In a recent workshop, participants came up with the following:

A tiger is an animal that . . .

• hunts
• lives in the jungle
• is a cat and larger than a dog
• has long fangs
  
  

These could all be characteristics of a tiger, but it’s important that ITAs use the definition step to give a description that expresses the essence of the term. Many animals hunt, lots of animals live in the jungle, and a great many also have long fangs. Although the third suggestion is closer to being a defining characteristic, there are still a few other creatures that could fit this description. A more appropriate defining characteristic for a tiger is that it has orange and black stripes; there are few animals that do!

Applying the Definition Step to Field-Specific Vocabulary

At this point, either you can ask students to generate a few terms from their field or you can provide them with a list of words that you have preselected for the activity. Have students repeat the above steps for each term, making sure that the definition hasn’t become more difficult to understand than the initial word or phrase to be defined. This is a good place to remind your class to imagine themselves as freshmen or sophomores with little to no knowledge of the material; experts in a field, like graduate teaching assistants, have problems remembering what is accessible or understandable to novices (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000).

Step 2: Connection

There are two major parts to the connection step of this procedure. The first is to give an analogy, and the second is to give an example based on course materials available.

Giving an Analogy

A useful place to start when preparing to talk about analogies with ITAs is the definition, as it’s possible that some students don’t use the word on a regular basis or haven’t considered the slightly different meanings it might have. In fact, the following definitions from Oxford Dictionaries Online provides instructors with two possible routes for giving analogies to students:

Analogy (n.)

1. a comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification.
2. a correspondence or partial similarity. (Oxford University Press, 2015)
   
   

Providing an initial comparison

If asked a question by a student who is struggling to grasp a concept at a basic level, an ITA can first make a comparison to everyday objects or activities like the ones below:

• A camera is like an eye.
• DNA is like a spiral staircase.
• Electricity is like flowing water.
• The immune system is like a police force.
  
  

These types of comparisons draw on a student's preexisting knowledge and could prevent confusion if one were to introduce other field-specific terms that the student doesn't know. The key to this type of analogy is that it should (1) reduce a complex idea down to a concrete, easily imaginable object or action and (2) focus on one or two crucial aspects of the concept's structure or function. Analogies of this type will break down under too much scrutiny, but they provide a good reference for the student.

Analogies that highlight differences

It is also the case that ITAs will be asked to define terms for students who have been keeping up with coursework and have decent background in class-related formulae, equipment, or vocabulary. In these situations, you can tell them to give a more useful comparison by setting the unknown term side by side with a familiar one and noting how they differ.

• An endothermic reaction is like an exothermic one, but the energy is absorbed instead of released.
• RNA is similar to DNA, but it is single stranded.
• Multipotency is like pluripotency, but multipotent cells can differentiate only into a smaller number of cell types.
• The xylem is like a plant's phloem, but it carries water and minerals.
  
  

Unlike the basic analogies noted above, this type of analogy can give a much closer approximation to the desired term. However, as these comparisons are more field specific, ITAs as teachers need to decide which contrasting characteristic they want to highlight in a specific situation. In the RNA example, an instructor might instead want to note that RNA is involved in transcription and translation (not just transcription), that it contains uracil in place of thymine, has ribose instead of deoxyribose sugars, or any number of other possibilities.

Giving an Example

Perhaps the easiest step in the whole process, giving an example, is just that: finding a relevant case in which the term or concept is shown clearly. For a chemistry course, an example could be drawn from a reaction or process that features the vocabulary item. In a history class, ITAs could point to a particular event, political party, or person that acts as an exemplar of a certain theory.

In the end, it’s important to remind ITAs throughout instruction to simplify and make meaningful connections for students. Technical jargon may become a crutch for a teaching assistant and prevent him or her from making those necessary connections. As physicist Richard Feynman (1965) once wrote, “The real problem in speech is not precise language. The problem is clear language” (p. 14).

References

Ashavskaya, E. (2015). International teaching assistants’ experiences in the U.S. classrooms: Implications for practice. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15, 56–69.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (Eds.). (2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Feynman, R. P. (1965). New textbooks for the “new” mathematics.Engineering and Science, 28(6), 9–15.

Oxford University Press. (2015). Analogy. In Oxford dictionaries online. Retrieved from http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/analogy

Smith, J., Meyers, C. M., & Burkhalter, A. J. (1992). Communicate: Strategies for international teaching assistants. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Regents/Prentice Hall.

Christopher Garth is an English as a foreign language instructor at Toyo University, in Tokyo, Japan, where he prepares students for study abroad. His research focus is on how tabletop role-playing games affect learner questioning patterns.