How We Survived Our First-Year Teaching as New ITAs

As international teaching assistants (ITAs) who teach English academic writing to ESL students at a U.S. university, we have faced challenges that native-English-speaking teachers (NESTs) might not have to face. In this article, we discuss the three most challenging issues that we identified in our first year as ITAs: (1) building trust and authority in a classroom, (2) addressing cultural issues, and (3) dealing with anxiety as new ITAs. We also illustrate how we tackled those problems to provide suggestions for ITAs who might also be or have been in similar situations. Our aim is not to provide perfect solutions, but to create a fruitful discussion on how to prepare ITAs for their first year of teaching by sharing our own experiences and thoughts.

Handling Trust and Authority Issues

Building trust and authority in class is on the top of our “challenge list,” because gaining trust and establishing authority are imperative for effective teaching. However, this can be challenging for ITAs because of the way they are perceived by ESL students. Moussu’s (2002, 2006) studies reported that ESL students tend to hold negative attitudes and beliefs toward nonnative-English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) because of their accents. This finding implies that students judge NNESTs based on their language use rather than on professional characteristics, such as quality of instruction; this was true to what we experienced as new ITAs. For example, one of us had a student repeatedly complain about the grade he received on a particular writing assignment. The student claimed that he deserved a better grade until he consulted a native-English-speaking tutor about his assignment, and he finally realized how much his essays needed to be improved. The student trusted the feedback from the tutor more than the feedback from his instructor because the tutor was a native English speaker. In other words, the student did not trust the ITA because of his prejudice to NNESTs’ expertise in the English language. However, at the end of the semester, he told the ITA, “I had some doubt in you [about teaching] at the beginning of the semester, but you proved that I was wrong.” For the ITA, this was a hard-won victory and an important realization: This student, like many others, would not have confidence in an NNEST’s qualifications until he or she proved his or her expertise or had that expertise affirmed by a NEST.

Winning students’ trust and establishing authority are important for teachers to effectively deliver instruction and facilitate student learning. For ITAs who are more likely to face negative judgments because of their accents, the issues of trust and authority seem to be more crucial. As ITAs of college composition in the United States, we intend to deliver the knowledge of English writing conventions and help students develop academic writing skills rather than teaching general language skills. Upon detecting students’ potential skepticism about our competence in the English language, we attempted to solve the issue by sharing with our students personal stories as second language learners and by drawing on words from experts in the field of English composition.

Personal experience, a distinctive asset of NNESTs to ESL students, served as a way of demonstrating how we develop to become experienced and mature writers, and helped us form a stronger bond with our students. Additionally, words from experts in the field were valuable resources that we tapped into to fortify our personal experiences. Combining these strategies, we found ourselves able to develop a close relationship with our students by positioning ourselves as advanced learners who shared the students’ experiences and understood their difficulties. At the same time, we resolved the authority issues in our own classrooms by showing our capability of facilitating students’ learning as mentors.

Developing Culturally-Responsive Materials for Effective Teaching

Another issue that ITAs often struggle with is the employment of culture-based teaching materials. Because we teach in the American context, the textbooks and teaching materials we use are often American culture based. The problem is that NNESTs might not be familiar with some of the terms and historical or cultural events and figures in the textbook or in other materials. We must research those culturally specific parts and spend more time preparing for teaching. It is worth mentioning that we often discussed such cultural references with our American colleagues. Such collaboration was beneficial not only to us but also to our colleagues, because our questions made them more aware of what their students from different cultures might not understand.

That said, we would also actively search for examples that were more relevant to our students’ lives rather than simply adopting the examples in the textbooks. As Howard (2001) argued, culturally relevant teaching can increase students’ motivation. For example, when teaching comparative analysis to Chinese students, we had them practice comparing school dress codes in their home country with those in the United States; this topic was more accessible to them than the example in the textbook, which compared the military strategies of Generals Petraeus and MacArthur.

Dealing With Anxiety as New ITAs

In addition to the cultural issues, many ITAs experience heightened anxiety as a result of feeling their self-confidence in the classroom threatened. Greis (1985) argued that all beginning teachers may feel anxiety but that, compared to NESTs, NNESTs often “experience a strong sense of fear that they will not attain the same level of proficiency, and that the ESL students may reject them preferring a native speaker as a teacher” (p. 318). Amin (1994) also found that NNESTs often felt disempowered by their students’ stereotype of an authentic English teacher. As new ITAs, we tended to be more anxious about our language proficiency. In an academic writing class, students are usually more critical about their instructors’ linguistic errors because such errors sometimes suggest a lack of proficiency in the language. As NNESTs, we are especially conscious of our students’ perceptions and prejudices, and we feel the responsibility (or burden) to perform in a way that will win their respect and appreciation. Thus, during our first-year teaching, we spent extra time preparing lessons and even practiced lecturing before class to ensure we spoke fluently in class. In particular, we tried hard to find different ways to express our meaning when explaining new concepts so that students would not ascribe their failure of comprehension to our language limitations.

For new ITAs who are experiencing anxiety, our suggestion is to work on building self-confidence in addition to rapport with the students. We shared our own experiences as advanced ESL writers and told the students that we were learning together with them and that we were willing to help them in any way we could. Being attentive to students’ different needs is also essential. In class, some advanced students might have high expectations for their achievements; for example, in addition to academic writing conventions and mechanics, some of our students also wanted us to help them improve vocabulary complexity, sentence variety, and stylistic writing choices. Nevertheless, as ESL writers ourselves, we knew that those were not the things that an English language learner can master within a period of time as short as a single semester. Therefore, we provided sufficient resources and recommended strategies for them to make good use of those resources in hopes that they could accumulate their own repertoire of writing skills over time.

In addition, our experiences have shown that teacher collaboration is very helpful in professional development. ITAs can work together to collect more resources for students and share effective teaching practice to improve pedagogy. More important, new ITAs can support each other psychologically and relieve anxiety in teaching.

Conclusion

As new ITAs, we have faced many challenges during our first year of teaching. However, we have overcome many of the difficulties by employing various strategies. The strategies we suggest for other new ITAs include reducing language barriers with more preparation, adapting teaching materials to make them more relevant and authentic to the students, sharing personal learning experiences with the students while drawing on words from experts to back up the personal experiences, and building a collaborative relationship with fellow teachers. There are, of course, many challenges for ITAs yet to be overcome, and with this article we would like to call attention to the issues regarding ITA development. Our hope is that we will all become the ITAs and NNESTs discussed by Ling and Braine (2007): educators who are favored by the students and whose efforts are recognized, appreciated, and rewarded.

References

Amin, N. (1994). Minority women teachers on ownership of English (Unpublished master’s research paper). Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto, Canada.

Greis, N. (1985). Towards a better preparation of the non-native ESOL teacher. In On TESOL '84: Selected papers from the 18th Annual Convention of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages (pp. 317–324). Washington, DC: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Howard, T. C. (2001). Telling their side of the story: African-American students' perceptions of culturally relevant teaching. The Urban Review, 33(2), 131–149.

Ling, C. Y., & Braine, G. (2007). The attitudes of university students towards non-native speakers English teachers in Hong Kong. Regional Language Centre Journal, 38, 257–277.

Moussu, L. (2002). English as a second language students’ reactions to nonnative English-speaking teachers (Master’s thesis). Retrieved from ERIC Database. (ED468879)

Moussu, L. (2006). Native and non-native English-speaking English as a second language teachers: Student attitudes, teacher self-perceptions, and intensive English program administrator beliefs and practices (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ERIC Database. (ED492599)

Xin Chen is a PhD student in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, Indiana University. She teaches English academic writing and serves as the program assistant of Multilingual Writing at Indiana University. Her research interests include multilingual students’ development of academic literacy and international education.

Jui-Hsin Hung is a PhD student in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, Indiana University. Her research interests lie in second language writer identity, multilingual teacher identity, and collaborative learning in the second language classroom.

Yeoeun Park is a PhD student in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, Indiana University. She has taught English academic writing at Indiana University and is interested in second language writing.

Jun Takahashi is a PhD student in the Department of Literacy, Culture, and Language Education, Indiana University. He has taught English composition to international students and the Japanese language. His research interests include second language writing, second language acquisition, and translanguaging.