International teaching assistant (ITA) programs sometimes struggle to get adequate support for their work; a recent informal survey reveals that, out of 30 ITA program directors, only 14 feel like they have adequate support from their university. One major complaint is a lack of buy-in from departments, who do not want one of their students to be restricted from working as a TA, as well as from the international graduate students, who resent having to take a test that their native-speaker counterparts do not have to take.

Building buy-in from these two audiences is critical for the success of an ITA program. Buy-in is usually best built through in-person interactions, but because of the large numbers of international students on campuses, meeting them in-person is often impractical. My home university, Carnegie Mellon, had almost 4,000 international graduate students in academic year 2016–17 (Carnegie Mellon University, 2016); it would have been impossible to meet with them, or even address them en masse. It is even impractical to speak with the hundreds of faculty that hire TAs each year.

Websites are an extremely practical way of getting in touch with these audiences. So what information do ITA programs actually want their audiences to know? I looked at the websites of six ITA programs to see what information about their tests and classes are currently given out on their websites.

What Should ITA Programs Communicate on Their Websites?

What do ITA programs want the wider campus to know about their classes and assessments? Though advertising the time and place of an ITA test is obligatory, ITA professionals have a greater responsibility to the wider campus to educate them about ITAs. Because ITA websites are the most readily available teaching tool for a broad lay audience, ITA programs should be explicit on their websites about the skill sets ITAs must develop. The common practice in spoken language assessment is that assessments should focus on more than grammatical or linguistic competence (Hoekje & Williams, 1994; Swender & Vickers, 2012; American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages [ACTFL], n.d.; Educational Testing Service, 2001). Intercultural savvy is highly valued, and assessments tend toward effectiveness, functions, and “can-do” statements (ACTFL, n.d.; Educational Testing Service, 2001).

The SPEAK test, used by many ITA programs as an assessment for ITA clearance, focuses on efficacy, coherence, and appropriateness of language (Educational Testing Service, 2001). Also widely applied in ITA testing are concepts from the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI), a language assessment developed by the ACTFL. The teaching methodology for the OPI stresses that “function, or the ability to DO things in the language, becomes the backbone of the proficiency-oriented classroom” (Swender & Vickers, 2012, p. 54). In the OPI assessment, function is one of the four criteria testers look for; the speaker’s ability to perform a specific type of task (e.g., describe or hypothesize) is crucial to the scoring of the test. Linguistic accuracy and comprehensibility are combined into one criterion of four. Other criteria are context/content and text type (e.g., the use of discourse language to produce extended discourse; Swender & Vickers, 2012, p. 14).

How can ITA programs communicate these precepts to their audiences? Hoekje and Williams (1994) presented a useful framework that provides a strong teaching and assessment model for the ITA community. This framework can guide ITA programs in communicating the goals and expectations of their programs to their campus audiences.

Hoekje and Williams (1994) broke communicative competence into four parts: grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. Grammatical competence includes the nuts and bolts of language: “morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, lexical items, and phonology” (p. 13). They emphasized that because ITA training is short, there is not enough time to develop grammatical competence in the ITA program, and so ITAs already need to have a critical amount of grammatical competence before they can benefit from ITA training programs.

Sociolinguistic competence for ITAs is defined as “how fully they understand and can respond according to the norms of interaction and interpretations in the classroom” (Hoekje & Williams, 1994, p. 15). This includes an understanding of cultural assumptions and a command of a range of speech styles (Hoekje & Williams, 1994).

Hoekje and Williams (1994) defined discourse competence as “to know how to integrate other components to produce and interpret cohesive and coherent discourse” for both productive and interpretive skills (p. 19). Cohesion is how “utterances [are] connected…to produce unified…text” (p. 19). Coherence is broken down into continuity (repetition and rephrasing) and progression (use of discourse markers; p. 20). All of these components work together to provide a smoothly flowing oral text.

Strategic competence is the “mastery of verbal and nonverbal strategies that can be used to compensate for deficiencies in other components of competence or to increase communicative effectiveness in general” (Hoekje & Williams, 1994, p. 23). Hoekje and Williams (1994) believed that discourse and strategic competence are the most useful or common strategies to teach.

This framework can help ITA programs by providing a consistent and standard set of competencies that the programs can refer to in the descriptions of their tests and courses. Such references would give an impression of the importance of each competence.

What Are ITA Programs Communicating on Their Websites?

How are ITA programs showcasing these important communication strategies on their websites? Not very well, unfortunately.

Each of the six websites was coded for references to each competency. Because it is unlikely that the websites would contain the technical jargon for each of these strategies, I looked for phrases that referred to the competencies in a more simplistic manner.

The websites each had a large number of references to grammatical competence, especially in the form of pronunciation lessons. Five of the websites had multiple mentions of classroom work on pronunciation and fluency, or the language needed to teach in the classroom.

The sixth program’s course descriptions leaned heavily on descriptions of the sociolinguistic competence needed to teach in the United States, perhaps because it is part of a teaching and learning center. All of the websites made some mention of the sociolinguistic aspects of the program, mostly through oblique language (e.g., offering a 2-hour session on Leading a Discussion).

Strategic competence was referred to by four websites as “compensation strategies.” Two websites did not mention strategic competence in course work at all.

Discourse competence was also strangely absent from the websites. Four websites had some references to presentation skills, two of them did not. Discussion of discourse competence did not go beyond this.

However, Hoekje and Williams (1994) stated that in ITA programs, discourse and strategic competence are the most common or useful skills taught. There is a lack of alignment in what ITA programs are teaching and assessing and what they portray themselves as teaching and assessing. ITA programs have to make significant changes to their websites so that they can more readily explain what it is that they are actually focusing on.

How Should ITA Programs Make Changes to Their Websites?

It is crucial for ITA programs to ensure that they update their websites to reflect the importance of strategic and discourse competence in their tests and teaching programs. It is misleading to test a skill set that is not highlighted clearly in the description of the ITA test or in class descriptions. Both ITAs and their faculty need to know that their students must be prepared to demonstrate these skill sets.

Strategic competence in classroom work could be highlighted using phrases like, “ITAs need to learn how to manage situations in which their language breaks down.” In the overview of their tests, ITA programs can explicitly state expectations for test performance, such as, “Students will be rated on their ability handle situations in which language skills such as listening, grammar, or vocabulary break down.”

In a similar way, ITA programs can highlight discourse competence in classroom work with phrasing like, “ITAs need to learn how to connect sentences into cohesive paragraphs and extended statements so that they can guide students in learning complex classroom content.” In the overview of the ITA test, ITA programs can make explicit statements, like “Test takers will be rated on their ability to connect sentences into cohesive paragraphs and paragraphs into extended discourse.”

In learning to better advocate for themselves and their expertise, ITA professionals should highlight the crucial aspects of their testing and teaching missions more openly to develop stronger buy-in from their campus audiences. I encourage ITA programs to review how they describe their programs, their tests, and their classes. They may find that the grudging support they get from the campus community becomes much warmer when the campus has a clearer picture of what the program is teaching and testing.

References

American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. (n.d.). World readiness standards for teaching foreign languages. Retrieved fromhttps://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages.

Carnegie Mellon University. (2016). CMU fact sheet. Retrieved from http://www.cmu.edu/assets/pdfs/cmufactsheet.pdf.

Educational Testing Service. (2001). Test of spoken English and speaking proficiency English assessment kit score user guide. Princeton, NJ: Author.

Hoekje, B., & Williams, J. (1994). Communicative competence as a theoretical framework for ITA education. In C. G. Madden & C. L. Myers (Eds.), Discourse and performance of international teaching assistants (pp. 11–26). Alexandria, VA: Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.

Swender, E., & Vicars, R. (2012). Oral proficiency interview tester training manual. White Plains, NY: American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.

Rebecca Oreto has been in the field of ITA testing for 15 years and has contributed several articles to the ITAIS Newsletter. She has previously served the ITAIS in the 3-year chair rotation from 2013–2016, and was editor of the ITAIS Newsletter from 2011–2013.