Written for anyone who works with graduate students to support their teaching efforts in American research universities, this book draws on the extensive experience of professional educators who represent a variety of programs throughout the United States. They understand the common constraints of many TA development classes, workshops, and programs, as well as the need for motivating and sophisticated techniques that are, at the same time, practical and focused. Their contributions to this book have proven to be effective in developing the sophisticated communication skills required by TAs across the disciplines.

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 This outdated positioning of ITAs as deficient diminishes the invaluable role they play within the academy.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.

Canada has become one of the most popular destinations for international students at the higher education level. A number of complex factors and trends, both in Canada and globally, have contributed to the emergence of Canada as a destination for international higher education. However, more research is still needed to better understand the experiences of international students in Canada considering the rapid growth in numbers as well as the social, political, and linguistic singularity of Canada as a destination. Multidisciplinary Perspectives on International Student Experience in Canadian Higher Education is an essential scholarly publication that explores international students' experiences in Canadian colleges and universities. It seeks to explore the various factors, aspects, challenges, and successes that characterize the international student experience in Canadian higher education from the perspective of international students and the academic communities to which they belong. Featuring a wide range of topics such as information literacy, professional development, and experiential learning, this book is ideal for academicians, instructors, researchers, policymakers, curriculum designers, and students.

Academic Communication Skills is designed to assist international graduate students as they create their own opportunities to expand their linguistic and strategic repertoires in academic English conversations. The needs of international graduate students are often different than those of others who have learned English as an additional language because they participate in academic conversations at advanced levels, encounter daily opportunities to discuss topics about which they have sophisticated knowledge, and are required to share their expertise with others (in their roles as teaching assistants or research assistants). As students progress in their academic studies, they increasingly understand that their fluency in academic oral communications plays an important role in their academic performance and future career options. While they recognize the importance, many voice frustrations, finding that speaking English is more difficult than writing and engaging in impromptu dialogues is more difficult than presenting prepared monologues. This book is an excellent resource for either classroom instruction or for self-study. It provides effective confidence-building strategies that speakers can try when participating in a range of different academic interactions. By guiding both students and instructors in examining common conversational challenges in academic environments, including many of the assumptions that frequently cause miscommunication, the book provides proven strategies for increased effectiveness and confidence in cross-cultural academic conversations.

Written by the director and staff of the first, and one of the largest, teaching centers in American higher education – the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching (CRLT) – this book offers a unique perspective on the strategies for making a teaching center integral to an institution’s educational mission. It presents a comprehensive vision for running a wide range of related programs, and provides faculty developers elsewhere with ideas and material to prompt reflection on the management and practices of their centers – whatever their size – and on how best to create a culture of teaching on their campuses. Given that only about a fifth of all U.S. postsecondary institutions have a teaching center, this book also offers a wealth of ideas and models for those administrators who are considering the development of new centers on their campuses.Topics covered include:• The role of the director, budgetary strategies, and operational principles• Strategies for using evaluation to enhance and grow a teaching center• Relationships with center constituencies: faculty, provost, deans, and department chairs• Engagement with curricular reform and assessment• Strengthening diversity through faculty development• Engaging faculty in effective use of instructional technology• Using student feedback for instructional improvement• Using action research to improve teaching and learning• Incorporating role play and theatre in faculty development• Developing graduate students as consultants• Preparing future faculty for teaching• The challenges of faculty development at a research universityIn the concluding chapter, to provide additional context about the issues that teaching centers face today, twenty experienced center directors who operate in similar environments share their main challenges, and the strategies they have developed to overcome them through innovative programming and careful management of their resources. Their contributions fall into four broad categories: institutional-level challenges, engaging faculty and students and supporting engaged pedagogy, discipline-specific programming, and programming to address specific instructor career stages.

Second language (L2) pronunciation has become increasingly visible as an important area of L2 teaching and research. Despite the growing number of resources available focused on L2 pronunciation, technology in L2 pronunciation has received much less attention. While technology has been an enduring strand of L2 pronunciation research, it has also been somewhat inconspicuous. Indeed, research has examined a wide variety of technologies such as language-learning platforms, speech visualization software, and Automatic Speech Recognition. Despite the abundance of research, it can be difficult to gain a full sense of work in this area given the lack of a comprehensive and consolidated resource or reference. This book endeavors to fill that gap and make L2 pronunciation technologies more visible by providing teachers and researchers an introduction to research in a wide variety of technologies that can support pronunciation learning. While working to introduce practitioners to numerous technologies available, it also dives into the research-basis for their use, providing new studies and data featuring a wide variety of languages and learning contexts.

This book offers contemporary perspectives on English pronunciation teaching and research in the context of increasing multilingualism and English as an international language. It reviews current theory and practice in pronunciation pedagogy, language learning, language assessment, and technological developments, and presents an expanded view of pronunciation in communication, education, and employment. Its eight chapters provide a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of pronunciation and the linguistic and social functions it fulfils. Topics include pronunciation in first and second language acquisition; instructional approaches and factors impacting teachers’ curriculum decisions; methods for assessing pronunciation; the use of technology for pronunciation teaching, learning, and testing; pronunciation issues of teachers who are second-language speakers; and applications of pronunciation research and pedagogy in L1 literacy and speech therapy, forensic linguistics, and health, workplace, and political communication. The chapters also critically examine the research base supporting specific teaching approaches and identify research gaps in need of further investigation. This rigorous work will provide an invaluable resource for teachers and teacher educators; in addition to researchers in the fields of applied linguistics, phonology and communication.

This book combines insights from language assessment literacy and critical language testing through critical analyses and research about challenges in language assessment around the world. It investigates problematic practices in language testing which are relevant to language test users such as language program directors, testing centers, and language teachers, as well as teachers-in-training in Graduate Diploma and Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics programs. These issues involve aspects of language testing such as test development, test administration, scoring, and interpretation/use of test results. Chapters in this volume discuss insights about language testing policy, testing world languages, developing program-level language tests and tests of specific language skills, and language assessment literacy. In addition, this book identifies two needs in language testing for further examination: the need for collaboration between language test developers, language test users, and language users, and the need to base language tests on real-world language use.

This handbook gathers in one volume the major research and scholarship related to multicultural science education that has developed since the field was named and established by Atwater in 1993. Culture is defined in this handbook as an integrated pattern of shared values, beliefs, languages, worldviews, behaviors, artifacts, knowledge, and social and political relationships of a group of people in a particular place or time that the people use to understand or make meaning of their world, each other, and other groups of people and to transmit these to succeeding generations. The research studies include both different kinds of qualitative and quantitative studies. The chapters in this volume reflect differing ideas about culture and its impact on science learning and teaching in different K-14 contexts and policy issues. Research findings about groups that are underrepresented in STEM in the United States, and in other countries related to language issues and indigenous knowledge are included in this volume.