Lixia Cheng, Purdue University, Lafayette, Indiana, USA

International Teaching Assistant (ITA) programs across many U.S. universities were founded around the 1980s to function somewhat like a crisis management resolution to mitigate the so-called “ITA problem” where domestic undergraduate students and families filed complaints about ITAs’ accentedness, incomprehensibility, and unfair grading. There is no denying that undergraduate students have comprised a large and important stakeholder group in ITA training since ITA programs’ first day of existence. Various initiatives have been led by ITA programs to involve undergraduate students, especially domestic undergraduates, in helping ITA candidates hone presentation skills and improve knowledge and understanding about American classroom culture.

Since the 2000’s or even earlier, the Oral English Proficiency Program (OEPP), the ITA program at Purdue University has invited undergraduate students to English 620 class sessions to observe ITA candidates’ simulated teaching presentation and participate in the Question & Answer session after each presentation. The five-credit pass/fail English 620 course (“Classroom Communication in ESL for Teaching Assistants”), offered by the OEPP to international graduate students who fail the in-house Oral English Proficiency Test (OEPT), includes, most of all, four rehearsed, simulated teaching presentations spread out across a semester.

In 2014, the OEPP increased its efforts to involve undergraduate audience members in the English 620 course, by designating a continuing lecturer as the volunteer coordinator. This volunteer coordinator has been tasked with 1) recruiting at least five volunteers for each 50-minute presentation session made up of two English 620 students’ simulated teaching presentations, and 2) expanding volunteer sources by developing and maintaining positive work relationships with faculty of various undergraduate courses, academic departments, and international programs on campus.

Over the years, the OEPP volunteer program has received highly positive ratings from the ITA candidates taking the English 620 course, as indicated in English 620 students’ responses to anonymous, comprehensive English 620 course-surveys administered at the end of the semester in a couple of previous years (Cheng, 2022, p. 112). Additionally, domestic undergraduate students’ enthusiasm about volunteering in the English 620 course to help ITA candidates improve communicative skills and earn themselves some intercultural experience and a great line on the resumé is shown by the large numbers of volunteer hours contributed to English 620 each year as well as in the video-recorded testimony that a Purdue undergraduate student provided for the OEPP volunteer program (Cheng, 2022, p. 111).

Rationale for the book chapter

My rationale for featuring the OEPP volunteer program in this book chapter was, first, to showcase and share with a community of practice, the OEPP volunteer program, which is highly sustainable as a carefully designed and institutionally supported curricular component in English 620, the ITA preparation course at Purdue. The feature “carefully designed” means that, first, a volunteer evaluation form and companion materials were created and revised by the OEPP for the purpose of facilitating undergraduate volunteers’ involvement in and evaluation of ITA candidates’ teaching presentations. Second, a specialized web application was developed to ensure efficient registration for volunteer sessions by Purdue undergraduate students and effective tracking of volunteer hours by OEPP administrators for the purposes of issuing Intercultural Communication Partner certificates to volunteers and thank-you notes to their senders. Last but not least, ITA candidates are also tasked with greeting the undergraduate volunteers and striking up a brief conversation if possible before the presentation session begins. With regard to the second feature, the types of institutional support that have been provided to the OEPP undergraduate volunteer program include the designation of a volunteer coordinator from the OEPP lecturers’ team and the ongoing and expanding partnerships with undergraduate courses, academic departments, and the international programs at Purdue for recruiting undergraduate volunteers for the English 620 course.

My second rationale for contributing a chapter to the edited volume on internationalization was the unique creative angle that internationalization, in general, and internationalization-at-home (IaH), in particular, can offer to studying ESL contact programs such as the OEPP volunteer program. According to Knight (2003), internationalization of higher education requires “an international, intercultural or global dimension” to be integrated into “the purpose, functions or delivery of post-secondary education” (Knight, 2003, p. 2). The OEPP volunteer program is a prime example to show that intercultural spaces can be created and cultivated for domestic undergraduate students and international graduate students where they are also intellectually engaged by purposely created academic tasks. This kind of IaH activity, event, or program is mutually beneficial to international graduate students and domestic undergraduate students with regard to improving future ITAs’ teaching quality for the benefit of undergraduate education as well as boosting the intercultural competencies of both the undergraduate volunteers and the ITA candidates. Another unique advantage of these contact programs is that domestic undergraduate students can work to improve their intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes without leaving their university campus or feeling a disruption to their other academic-social pursuits at their university. Indeed, IaH is more cost-effective to undergraduate students than the traditional study-abroad path taken by U.S. undergraduates with the aims of improving intercultural competencies and becoming internationalized, well-employable college students and global citizens. IaH activities may also lead to informed decisions by some undergraduate students about obtaining an extended study-abroad or internationalization-abroad experience in a targeted foreign country.

Structure and main content of the book chapter

With these two threads of thought, I became greatly motivated to contribute a chapter about the OEPP volunteer program to Allen et al.’s (2022) book which addresses internationalization from a second language perspective. After much deliberation, I decided to begin my chapter with a historical overview of Purdue’s internationalization efforts since World War I, in order to provide the institutional context and lay the groundwork for introducing the OEPP, Purdue’s first-ever formal academic program for providing campus-wide ESL support.

Building on this historical overview of Purdue’s efforts over the recent 100 or so years to gradually internationalize its campus, I then turned the spotlight on one internationalization effort: the ITA preparation course (i.e., English 620) offered by the OEPP to help pre-service ITAs improve classroom communication skills. After covering the main course requirements and the format of instruction in the English 620 course, I further narrowed the focus down to undergraduate volunteering, which has been an integral curricular component in English 620. After common themes emerged from my investigation into a multitude of OEPP program documents, two main research questions were developed, focusing on: 1) the format and scope of the volunteer program, and 2) ITA candidates’ and undergraduate volunteers’ perceptions about the value of the volunteer program.

The main findings of this descriptive study on the OEPP volunteer program include, first, undergraduate volunteering takes the form of either observing and evaluating two presentations in a 50-minute English 620 presentation session or participating in a mid-semester 50-minute “Cookies and Conversation” session. The vast majority of all volunteer spots per semester are entered into the web application for observers of English 620 students’ teaching presentations except for a few volunteer sessions created for the “Cookies and Conversation” Roundtables. To put the scope of the volunteer program into perspective, a total of 1,536 undergraduate volunteers contributed 2,869 hours in the academic year of 2017–2018; that is to say, on average, each of the 1,536 undergraduate students had contributed almost two volunteer hours or two 50-minute volunteer sessions. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic year of 2020–2021, there was a decent volume with a total of 1,177 volunteer hours contributed by 590 undergraduate students, thanks to advanced video conferencing technologies and the adaptability of English 620 students, instructors, and undergraduate volunteers to online presentations and meetings.

In response to the second research question, an average of 96 percent of all survey respondents across three past fall semesters either agreed or strongly agreed with this statement in the comprehensive end-of-semester OEPP-internal course-survey: “having undergrads in the audience during [English] 620 presentations was a valuable experience” (Cheng, 2022, pp. 111–112). In the video testimonies provided by an undergraduate volunteer and an English 620 graduate student, these representatives of the two sides in the intercultural interactions find including undergraduate volunteers in the English 620 class enjoyable and valuable for improving ITA candidates’ teaching presentations and the overall quality of undergraduate education (Cheng, 2022, pp. 110–112).

However, there has been very little existing data on the perceived value of undergraduate volunteering in the English 620 course for both sides’ development of intercultural knowledge, skills, and attitudes. The only available data seems to exist in 1) some of the guiding questions for undergraduate volunteers to use during the Question and Answer session, and 2) the selected Roundtable discussion topics about undergraduate volunteers’ experience with ITAs or English 620 students’ experience with being an ITA themselves.

Thoughts on future research

Based on this preliminary study exploring the necessity and efficacy of a structured ESL contact program which brings ITA candidates and domestic undergraduate students together, future research may include survey studies that investigate the perceived value of such a contact program for intercultural development by the both sides involved in the linguistic and intercultural interactions. In addition, quasi-experimental studies (e.g., replication of Staples et al., 2014) can be designed to involve undergraduate volunteers in frequent, well-structured interactions with ITA candidates in order to examine the impacts that exposure to non-native English speakers’ accents and increased familiarity with other cultures may have on domestic undergraduate volunteers’ perceptions of accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility.

References

Allen, M., Ene, E. & McIntosh, K. (Eds.) (2022). Building internationalized spaces: Second language perspectives on developing language and cultural exchange programs in higher education. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Cheng, L. (2022). Enhancing internationalization-at-home through undergraduates’ volunteering for an International Teaching Assistant (ITA) program. In M. Allen, E. Ene, & K. McIntosh, (Eds.), Building internationalized spaces: Second language perspectives on developing language and cultural exchange programs in higher education (pp. 101–119). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Knight, J. (2003). Updated definition of internationalization. International Higher Education, (33), https://doi.org/10.6017/ihe.2003.33.7391

Staples, S., Kang, O., & Wittner, E. (2014). Considering interlocutors in university discourse communities: Impacting U.S. undergraduates’ perceptions of ITAs through a structured contact program. English for Specific Purposes, 35(1), 54–65. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2014.02.002