Jane Harvey and Elizabeth Ramsay, University of South Florida, Florida, USA

Background

The first author, Jane, oversees the Oral Proficiency Language Assessment for first-semester ITAs at the university and delivers short Academic Culture and Communication and Speaking courses that are optional for most of the ITAs. She also collaborates with an instructor from the CSD department to pair up volunteer undergraduate students with ITAs who request to participate. They provide the volunteers with resources, give general guidance on how to initiate the collaboration, and check in regularly with both ITAs and volunteers. However, when and how the interactions and collaborations between the volunteers and ITAs happen is left up to the dyads to negotiate between themselves. Generally, they meet once a week for at least half of a semester, though some meet for several more weeks, sometimes continuing into the following semester. The second author, Elizabeth, is one of the volunteer undergraduate students who has worked with four different ITAs over four Spring and Fall semesters. This article reports on Elizabeth and Jane’s perceptions of the positive outcomes of the collaborations with regard to how they meet the individuality of the needs of the ITAs, allow for flexibility in volunteer practice to meet those needs, and offer important benefits to both ITAs and volunteers.

Appropriacy of CSD students for work with ITAs

In their CSD program, undergraduates are taught knowledge and skills that enable them to provide support for ITAs in ways that benefit both parties. Their classes give them a background in phonology, pragmatics, semantics, etc. with an emphasis on descriptive rather than prescriptive language use. Their courses also contain discussions about intercultural competence because of the potential of future work with immigrant children. Elizabeth states explicitly that they are taught not to have biases. Jane has never received a report from an ITA of any instance where they felt diminished or uncomfortable with a volunteer. Often, in fact, the ITA will stress the positive feelings that emerged from the collaboration. The benefit to the volunteers of the collaboration includes the chance to gain hands-on experience of applying the knowledge they learn in their courses, a chance that Elizabeth feels they would not otherwise have given that only as graduate students can they have internships. As overseer of the ITA support, Jane has been consistently impressed by the professionalism shown by the volunteers.

Individuality of ITA needs and wants

During Elizabeth’s experience with the ITAs, she noted the unique needs and wants of the individuals she has worked with. In terms of learning styles, while some benefited from a structured practice approach, a more conversational approach suited others. Some would specify areas of development, others left that to her diagnosis, but she notes that each ITA was appreciative of the individualized feedback she was able to give them. Though often seen as a homogenous group, students from any country “may differ widely in their age, economic status, gender, sexual orientation, family and marital status, educational and socioeconomic background, or English language proficiency and familiarity with the new academic system”, as Sharma (2018, p. 99) points out about students from China. Similarly, Elizabeth found a difference between the needs and wants of the two ITAs from China with whom she worked. Very early in their interactions, she found that the first ITA did not really have any noticeable language or pronunciation issues, but was interested in learning about Elizabeth’s life as an undergraduate student. The second ITA from China did have pronunciation issues she wanted worked on despite a high level of overall proficiency. Elizabeth’s strategy was to engage her in conversation, identify occasions and aspects of pronunciation that made comprehension challenging, and then give structured practice in those aspects. Each of the four ITAs Elizabeth worked with had unique needs and wants. She noted, “I have had ITAs that just wanted an American to talk to, others who had the goal of improving their fluency, and one ITA who really needed structured practice with sounds, intonation, speed, etc.”. The dyadic format of the collaboration meant that the needs and wants of the ITAs were what dictated the nature of the interactions.

Flexibility in approach

This difference in ITA needs and wants caused Elizabeth to change the way she worked with each of them over the four semesters. She learned early that she could not really adopt the same approach with each ITA, so she resisted creating a plan for the collaboration until after their first meeting. At that point, she was able to pull from the activities she had already used with previous ITAs or come up with new activities as needed. She typically started out the meetings by asking questions (preferably a question that was both fun and thought-provoking). Then she would begin the structured activities or continue to ask questions to prompt a conversation, depending on the needs and wants of the ITA. This dynamically evolving approach to meeting the learning styles and general inclinations of ITAs differs noticeably from the pre-determined and monolithic nature of credit or non-credit courses for ITAs.

Giving ITAs confidence

Elizabeth notes that each ITA was able to gain confidence as a result of the different ways she developed of working with them. Even if it seemed like an ITA did not have much to learn from her, she felt that teaching them something new built their confidence. For example, she introduced one ITA to the phonetic alphabet that the ITA then said helped her in her various classes. Another ITA gained confidence through the individualized and focused feedback and practice that she felt helped her become more comfortable and intelligible when speaking. With another ITA, who simply enjoyed learning something new, Elizabeth would introduce some common idioms after their conversations, for which he expressed appreciation and enjoyment. Elizabeth’s remark that “most of the ITAs just wanted to speak to an American and they responded really well to feedback” suggests that the focused and individualized nature of the feedback and practice was what gave them the feeling that they were improving and therefore increased their confidence. This echoes Sharma’s (2018) assertion that for international graduate students in general, “different or differentiated support” (p. 86) can be greatly beneficial to international graduate students.

Benefits to Elizabeth and CSD students in general

Alongside these benefits to the ITAs, Elizabeth herself gained a great deal from the experience over the semesters. While Speech and Language Pathology professionals do not necessarily work with international students, there was a great deal of knowledge and skills from her CSD studies that she was able to apply to her work with the ITAs, such as phonetics, articulation, gathering speech samples, etc. The experience also helped her identify professional goals for her future as well as broadening her understanding of international students and helping her learn to be more compassionate towards them. She has become a lot more aware of biases she may hold towards people whose first language is not English and has been able to work on pushing past that mindset. Alongside the opportunity to understand more about other cultures, she and other volunteers gain a new appreciation of how to work with different people and their different learning needs and styles.

Jane’s perspective

As overseer of the ITA support activities at the university, Jane is very positive about benefits to the ITAs of the collaboration. These benefits, which would be less available in class-based pronunciation courses with ITAs from diverse language backgrounds, include individualized feedback and practice with pronunciation of sounds, intonation, etc., development of the ITAs’ confidence as speakers of English in a US academic setting; real-life exposure to help them understand UG students. Both the CSD instructor and Jane found early on that they could trust the volunteers to build positive relations with ITAs and really help them in unique ways to develop their pronunciation, language, or interpersonal interaction skills. The symbiotic nature of the relationship and interaction meant that the volunteers also gained enormously from their participation so that the collaboration which started as an experiment has evolved into an integral element in both ITA support and volunteer opportunities for CSD undergraduates.

Conclusion

In conclusion, both authors recommend such collaborations for the variety of reasons outlined above. The undergraduate CSD students, whose coursework prepares them to work with ITAs, are able to take account of and meet individualized language and other needs of ITAs. This contact helps develop mutual understanding and learning to the professional and academic benefit of both parties. The authors recommend that the participation be framed as collaboration rather than tutoring because the latter focuses only on the ITA as linguistically and culturally deficient and takes no account of the clear benefits to volunteers. The overall success of the partnerships and the role that ITAs have in directing how the collaborations proceed suggest that ITAs do not always need to be taught but instead can be given opportunities to autonomously direct their own learning.

References

Sharma, S. (2018). Writing Support for International Graduate Students: Enhancing Transition and Success. Routledge.