Investigating the effects of discipline and first-language backgrounds on ITAs’ instructional discourse patterns

Abstract

Using a multidimensional analysis (MDA), this study aimed to increase the understanding of international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) instructional language use by analyzing co-occurring linguistic features during their mock-teaching presentations in ITA assessment. With this purpose, the study examined the effects of ITAs’ proficiency levels, disciplines, and first-language backgrounds on their discourse patterns. The data comprised a corpus of 165 prospective ITAs’ mock-teaching presentations in ITA assessment. Based on the two dimensions of the twenty-six linguistic features found prevalent in university classroom talk (Csomay, 2005), an additive MDA was performed. Overall, the mock-teaching presentations of more proficient ITAs involved more contextual, directive, and personalized framing discourse features, with interaction effects for the ITAs’ disciplines and first-language backgrounds. The study discusses the implications for ITA training and assessment and directions for future studies. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.

Keywords

• international teaching assistant (ITA)
• English-medium instruction (EMI)
• learner corpus analysis
• instructional discourse
• speaking assessment