A Transdisciplinary Approach to International Teaching Assistants

Perspectives from Applied Linguistics

Stephen Daniel Looney, Shereen Bhalla

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788925563
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación de adultos

North American universities depend on international teaching assistants (ITAs) as a substantial part of the teaching labor force, which has led to the idea of an 'ITA problem', a deficiency model which is framed as a divergence between ITAs' linguistic competence and undergraduates' and their parents' expectations. This outdated positioning of ITAs as deficient diminishes the invaluable role they play within the academy. This book argues instead for an approach to ITA which recognizes them as multilingual, skilled, migrant professionals who participate in and are discursively constructed through various participant frameworks, modalities and activities. The chapters in this volume offer state-of-the-art research into ITA using a variety of methods and approaches, and as such constitute a transdisciplinary perspective which argues for the importance of dialogue between research and practice.

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A Transdisciplinary Approach to ITA

Stephen Daniel Looney and Shereen Bhalla

Introduction

North American universities depend on international teaching assistants (ITAs) as a substantial part of the teaching labor force, particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). This reality has led scholars from diverse disciplines to investigate the impact of American undergraduates being taught by ITAs and has even drawn attention from non-academic, mainstream media outlets (Clayton, 2000; Finder, 2005). International graduate students teaching courses in large part populated by monolingual US and Canadian students has led to the antiquated coining of the term ‘the ITA Problem’ (Williams, 1992). This ‘problem’ has often been framed as a divergence between ITAs’ linguistic competence and undergraduates’ and their parents’ expectations for what ITAs’ speech should sound like. This outdated positioning of ITAs as deficient in their effectiveness as university instructors has diminished the invaluable role they play within the academy and the many contributions they make to the university.

Deficiency models of ITA are something we, and many of our colleagues involved in ITA research and preparation, refute and what this volume works against. Instead, we propose an approach to ITA that recognizes them as multilingual, skilled, migrant professionals who participate in and are discursively constructed through various participant frameworks, modalities and activities. We do not deny that ITAs can benefit from further English language instruction and teaching preparation but, in fact, seek to improve the institutional support that ITAs receive before and while they teach and work at US universities. We recognize that undergraduates, faculty and administrators all play an active role in what has been inaccurately deemed a problem, and what in actuality is a stated goal in many institutions’ own mission statements, i.e. internationalization of the university.

The real problem from our perspective is a lack of cohesiveness in ITA practice, research and policy. This incoherence is the result of several factors including the education, academic home and institutional role of many ITA professionals, where research is published, and institutional support for ITA programs. Many ITA practitioners are trained English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and hold graduate degrees in TESOL, Education and related fields. ITA Programs are situated in a plethora of units across universities including Intensive English Programs (IEP), centers for teaching and learning excellence, graduate schools and academic departments to mention. Across these units, ITA practitioners do their job in various ways: running seminars, teaching semester-long courses and assessing ITAs’ English proficiency.

As most ITA practitioners are teachers by both training and trade, research on ITAs often goes unnoticed or is thought to be irrelevant. Nonetheless, there has been a steady stream of ITA research over the past 30 years. While seemingly disjointed, this body of literature has produced a wealth of findings that will be reviewed later in this chapter. Another challenge for practitioners and researchers trying to get their arms around ITA, is the diversity of epistemological and methodological perspectives underlying studies. We argue that a recent group of scholars in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have provided an adaptable framework for conceptualizing ITA coherently as a subdiscipline of Applied Linguistics and TESOL – transdisciplinarity (Douglas Fir Group [DFG], 2016). In the remainder of this chapter, we ask what a transdisciplinary approach to ITA looks like. We begin with an introduction to recent conceptualizations of SLA as transdisciplinary and then outline the history of ITA research and make the argument that, though it has not been explicitly stated, ITA research and practice has always been transdisciplinary. Finally, our own transdisciplinary approach to ITA research is outlined and each chapter is briefly summarized.

Transdisciplinarity and SLA

For nearly a decade, a sizeable group of scholars in SLA have been proposing transdisciplinary approaches to SLA (Atkinson, 2011; DFG, 2016; Duff & Byrnes, 2019; Hall, 2019a). The group is composed of scholars representing ‘alternative’ approaches to SLA (Atkinson, 2011) including but not limited to Conversation Analysis, Dynamic Systems Theory, Language Socialization, Post-structural Feminism, Socio-Cognitive Theory, Sociocultural Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics. DFG argues for a transdisciplinary approach to SLA that views language learning as a complex ‘ongoing process […] that assumes the embedding, at all levels, of social, sociocultural, sociocognitive, sociomaterial, ecosocial, ideological, and emotional dimensions’ (DFG, 2016: 24). Therefore, SLA is more than an individual acquiring input, and involves multiple actors interacting in situated contexts for various reasons over space and time.

From this perspective, SLA is a social and biological phenomenon that operates on various scales and is influenced by a plethora of factors existing on three levels: micro, meso and macro. The micro level involves ‘multilingual contexts of action and interaction contributing to multilingual repertoires’ (DFG, 2016: 25; Hall, 2019b; Kasper & Wagner, 2011). Multilingual repertoires are collections of semiotic resources and practices that speakers draw upon in interaction and include linguistic, prosodic and non-verbal resources. SLA’s meso level is composed of sociocultural institutions and communities. These institutions and communities include schools, work places and social organizations. Research concerned with the meso level of SLA often investigates communities of practice, social identities, investment, agency and power (Darvin & Norton, 2015; Duff, 2019; Duff & Talmy, 2011; Lave & Wenger, 1991; Norton & McKinney, 2011). The macro level of SLA involves ideological structures such as cultural, political and economic values (Ortega, 2019) From a transdisciplinary perspective, the three levels of SLA are not distinct entities but holistically interact with one another in reciprocal fashions.

In addition to rethinking the scope and scale of what SLA is, a transdisciplinary approach makes us rethink L2 speakers all together. Language learners are multilinguals whose identity as a language novice is complex, dynamic and perhaps not always relevant to the here and now (Firth & Wagner, 1997). Multilingual identities exist in harmony and conflict with professional, personal and political identities. These identities are dynamic in that they evolve over time and are affected both by the individual and the communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) in which the individual participates. For instance, a multilingual at a US university might be the language novice in their Biology lab group but a stand out and leader in their English as a Second Language (ESL) writing course. In these different contexts, a multilingual speaker’s access to speaking rights are constrained and enabled in different ways.

The transdisciplinary framework is not only a lens through which to view research though. It also has two stated practical imperatives. The first is to expand researchers’ and teachers’ view of ‘learners’ diverse multilingual repertoires […] and identities so as to enable their participation in a wide range of social, cognitive, and emotional activities, networks, and forms of communication and learning’ (DFG, 2016). The second goal is to develop learners’ ‘awareness not only of the cultural, historical, and institutional meanings that their language-mediated social actions have [and] of the dynamic and evolving role their actions play in the shaping of their own and others’ worlds’ (DFG, 2016: 25). To accomplish these goals, language teachers and researchers must collaborate with one another as well as making their research and practice comprehensible and relevant for parties outside their own disciplines. The most important of these parties are policymakers who can affect the kind of institutional change that could enable improved understanding of and support for ITAs.

Framing ITA as Transdisciplinary

Divided into three subsections, this section will give a brief history of ITA research and argue that the field of ITA has always been transdisciplinary in that it emerges from a variety of fields and focuses on various topics. The first subsection, the micro, covers ITA research on language and social interaction. The second reviews research on ITA and undergraduate identity, experience and biases. The third subsection lays out why implicit transdisciplinarity is not a sufficient model to sustain ITA as a field.

The micro: Language and social interaction

The micro level of a transdisciplinary SLA involves the biological and cognitive mechanisms of language learning as well as the semiotic systems participants use and the interactions in which learners participate (DFG, 2016). While we know of no research on the biological and cognitive mechanisms of ITA development, language and social interaction has been the one theme extending from beginning to the end of ITA research (Gorsuch, 2015; Madden & Myers, 1994; Young, 1989). The implementation of laws mandating certification of English fluency for ITAs in and of itself created a focus for ITA research and practice: locate and resolve the discrepancies between ITA spoken-English and so-called Standard American English (SAE).

ITA talk: Grammar and lexis

Throughout the 1990s and the 21st century, communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980) has remained the dominant paradigm in ITA research on language and social interaction (Madden & Myers, 1994; Oreto, 2018). Understanding how ITAs and their L1 English-speaking counterparts use specific grammatical and lexical constructions such modal verbs, interrogatives and discourse markers to guide student action and thought has been the key concern. The underlying assumption is that more indirect forms, e.g. modal verb constructions, are preferred to more direct constructions such as imperatives (Myers, 1994; Reinhardt, 2010; Tapper, 1994). Findings show that ITAs use fewer questions (Myers, 1994) and modal constructions (Reinhardt, 2010; Tapper, 1994) than TAs do in interactions with students. It has been argued that an overreliance on forms with more direct illocutionary force has a negative impact on interactions with students because actions such a telling are more face-threatening and less intellectually engaging than are questions.

Like the use of modal verbs and questions in lab settings, when lecturing, ITAs often utilized fewer discourse markers and in more limited contexts than TAs (Liao, 2009; Tyler, 1992). Using fewer discourse markers negatively affects ratings of ITA speech and participants characterize ITA lectures as disjointed and difficult to follow (Tyler, 1992). ITAs use fewer discourse markers not only because of L2 competence but also time to plan before lecturing, self-regulation, personal attitudes and contexts of interaction (Liao, 2009; Looney, 2015; Looney et al., 2017; Williams, 1992). In the context of lectures, ITAs employ more explicit discourse marking when given time to plan than if their lecture is unplanned (Williams, 1992). This demonstrates that while ITAs may be aware of discourse markers they need time to plan lectures to maximize their use. Interestingly, in actual mathematics lectures, both ITAs and TAs use the discourse marker okay in stretches of self-directed talk while making transitions (Looney et al., 2017). These uses of okay not only serve interpersonal purposes, i.e. clearly marking transitions in lectures for students, but also intrapersonal purposes, i.e. mediating teachers’ own thought and action. This shows that discourse markers are not only significant for improving comprehensibility but also a powerful resource for self-mediation in L1 and L2 talk.

Liao (2009) and Looney (2015) both investigate the use of discourse markers in non-lecture contexts, sociolinguistic interviews and physics laboratory classroo...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Contributors
• 1. A Transdisciplinary Approach to ITA
• 2. The Role of Intonation in the Production and Perception of ITA Discourse
• 3. Co-operative Action – Addressing Misunderstanding and Displaying Uncertainty in a University Physics Lab
• 4. Instructional Authority and Instructional Discourse
• 5. Enhancing Communication between ITAs and US Undergraduate Students
• 6. Examining Rater Bias in Scoring World Englishes Speakers Using a Transdisciplinary Approach: Implications for Assessing International Teaching Assistants
• 7. A Community of Practice Approach to Understanding the ITA Experience
• 8. Situating ITAs in Higher Education and Immigration Policy Studies
• 9. Using Course Logic to Describe Outcomes and Instruction for an ITA Course
• 10. Five Imperatives for ITA Programs and Practitioners
• Index