Haoshan (Sally) Ren, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

With the move towards virtual instruction, international teaching assistants (ITAs) are encountering challenges related to the online teaching environment. The format of online synchronous teaching has demonstrated itself to be a challenging task for ITAs, not only for the amount of planning required before class, but also the use of instructional language in the online classroom. Unless a course is specifically designed to be highly interactive, online teaching tends to be more monologic because of the technical restraints; instructors typically find themselves talking for longer turns, filling in silence, and readdressing overlapped speech. Using research findings from corpus linguistics empirical studies, this article introduces two types of functional languages that could help ITAs communicate more effectively with their students when teaching online.

Use Questions That Focus The Attention, But Do Not Require An Answer

Empirical studies in corpus linguistics show that questions in monologic lectures are commonly used to draw attention from the students without needing a verbal answer. In addition to the simple yes/no "check-up" questions (e.g., "does it make sense?"), teachers also raise questions with an intention to provide definitions (e.g., What is …? It is…), explain causalities (e.g., Why is…? Because…), or describe processes (e.g., What happens next? Let's look at…). This type of question is called content-oriented questions, as discussed in Chang’s (2012) study on questions used in classroom teaching. Going beyond the conventional taxonomy of categorizing questions by their grammatical structures, Chang (2012) presents a corpus-based study of question functions in academic lectures. In general, questions in lectures are categorized into two functional types:

• Audience-oriented: used interactively to engage students.
• Content-oriented: used to focus information or to stimulate thought, instead of eliciting answers.

We use questions to keep students engaged, but online teaching does not always allow for the rapid back and forth interaction we are typically accustomed to during in-person classes. In these instances, instructors can use more content-oriented questions instead of audience-oriented questions. Below are two main types of content-oriented questions and their functional descriptions:

• Questions to focus information: This type of question is posed and immediately answered by the instructor. It is used to direct the students' attention to upcoming information. E.g.,
• “So what is binary? Binary is a base-two numeral system that is made up of only two numbers. Which two numbers? Zero and One. Yes exactly…” – from an introductory computer science class
• Questions to stimulate thoughts: These are questions or issues to which there are no easy answers. When asking these questions, the instructor does not immediately provide answers nor expect answers. Instructors may provide additional comments on the question and encourage students to reflect on the questioned issue as they move on with the lecture content. E.g.,
• “Are there linguistic changes that can be attributed to language contact? Actually, this is a fairly controversial area…”

Use Wh-Clauses To Organize The Discourse And Highlight Information

In addition to using content-oriented questions to focus students’ attention, ITAs may also use embedded wh-clauses to draw students’ attention and organize the class discourse. In both in-person and online teaching, it is important for students to understand what is going on in the class at a certain moment. Embedding wh-clauses provide students with metalinguistic signals to highlight what follows in the lectures. Teaching ITAs to use these metalinguistic devices helps them to better organize their lectures, so that their students are constantly reminded with "road-signs" of where they are at during a lecture. Below are some examples:

• “What I’m gonna do is to show you an example of…”
• “What we just covered is a type of ….”
• “What you’ll see in the next slide is…”

These wh-clause structures are called wh-clefts, which is a construction that contains a wh-subordinate relative clause and a superordinate clause linked by the copula be (Deroey, 2012, p.113). The wh-clause usually contains old or given information that serves to contextualize what is being introduced in the rest of the sentence – the new or the highlighted information. For example, in the sentence, “what this device does is that it generates energy,” “the device” is a piece of information previously introduced in the discourse; therefore, it is included in the wh-clause to foreground and emphasize its function – generating energy. Using wh-clefts in academic lectures stimulates thinking by adding a dialogic dimension to what is normally a statement.

In addition to organizing discourse, wh-clefts also perform other discourse functions that help students to focus their attention on upcoming lecture content. Below is a summary of the functional framework discussed in Deroey (2012):

This article aims to provide functional language resources for ITA trainers and the ITAs to better address communication issues in in-person and online teaching environments. Focusing on language functions in addition to language forms helps ITAs to heighten their awareness of the form-function connection of genre-specific language use, thus facilitating ITAs' effective language learning and using for their specific contexts of teaching.

References

Chang, Y.-Y. (2012). The use of questions by professors in lectures given in English: Influences of disciplinary cultures. English for Specific Purposes, 31(2), 103–116.

Deroey, K. L. (2012). What they highlight is…: The discourse functions of basic wh-clefts in lectures. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 11(2), 112-124.