The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock-teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The…

Educators of International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) have been overlooked, erroneously. As teacher educators, their work is exponentially important to North American universities. A multiple case study examined three ITA Educators' ideologies, involving data from two interviews -one being a stimulated recall using classroom observations…

This study investigated U.S. undergraduates' perceptions of non-native speakers' (NNS) speech which had received 100% proficiency scores on the TOEFL iBT test. Fifty-five U.S. undergraduates rated 20 speech samples for comprehensibility, accentedness, and acceptability. The speech samples were also analyzed for acoustic fluency. Descriptively,…

There are two broad approaches to the research and teaching of second-language (L2) pronunciation--'bottom-up' and 'top-down'--which roughly align with structural and communicative approaches to language teaching. A bottom-up approach, explicitly focusing on de-contextualised linguistic forms, is structuralist and predominated in the second half…

This article describes a narrative study exploring the challenges that international teaching assistants (ITAs) encounter when using humor in North American university classrooms. Twenty participants were recruited from twelve teaching fields. Each ITA participated in two interviews and a videotaped teaching observation. The participants talked…

Most research focusing on the challenges that international teaching assistants (ITAs) encounter in U.S. classrooms employs a linguistic perspective. The present study furthers that research by examining other challenges unique to ITAs, through the lens of an intercultural competence framework. Through individual interviews with 15 ITAs, the study…

Second-language (L2) testing researchers have explored the relationship between speakers' overall speaking ability, reflected by holistic scores, and the speakers' performance on speaking subcomponents, reflected by analytic scores (e.g., McNamara, 1990; Sato, 2011). These research studies have advanced applied linguists' understanding of how…

This study explored students' perceptions of instructional practices of international teaching assistants (ITAs) who did and did not participate in additional professional development through a Teaching Methods course. The study also sought to understand the components of the Teaching Methods course that supported ITAs in inquiry-based chemistry…

In countries such as the United States and Canada, an increasing number of non-native English speaking graduate students work in the capacity of university teaching assistants. Over the past several decades, a number of communication challenges between non-native English speaking International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) and native English-speaking…

This paper examines the chronotopic nature of physics discourse and instructional practices that are mediated through the integration of disciplinary spatial repertoires and mathematical symbolic systems. The paper addresses how meanings are constructed during instruction between bilingual international teaching assistants (ITAs) and undergraduate…

German, and increasingly French and Spanish, programs are by nature global because they attract graduate students and faculty from around the world. Most have studied the language and "big C" cultural products during their graduate studies, but they have not necessarily learned approaches for fostering intercultural communicative…

The possession of a foreign accent constitutes one of the challenges international teaching assistants have to deal with in their encounters in U.S. classrooms. This challenge often impacts their perceived competence and effectiveness in the classroom. Consequently, undergraduate students usually have existing stereotypes about international…

Research has focused almost exclusively on International Teaching Assistants'(ITA) experiences as instructors, overlooking the ITA training class. This has led to the marginalization of Pre-Service ITAs in the literature. The locus of potentially important learning, a descriptive, multiple case study examined the investment (Darvin & Norton,…

International teaching assistants (ITA's) perform a variety of instructional roles in undergraduate education within North American universities. ITA training programs often exist to prepare them for such roles. Empirical work has examined ITA training courses, but most often through the practitioner's lens of program evaluation, which obscures…

Research provides evidence of effective factors in pronunciation teaching and learning. However, incorporating research into classroom practice is a challenge left to instructors, often without the help of a systematic framework for integrating pronunciation into a curriculum. This article, informed by work with international teaching assistants,…