Characterizing Successful Classroom Discourse for NNS Teaching Assistant Training

As the number of foreign-born graduate students in U.S. universities has risen over the past few years, a steadily increasing proportion of undergraduate education, especially in large public universities, has come into the hands of nonnative-speaking (NNS) teaching assistants who have limited English proficiency. Although ESL teachers and researchers have recently begun to design training programs suited to the special needs of the NNS graduate student teaching assistant, these programs are most frequently based on general-purpose language-learning materials. The suggestions offered in this article for a more specific-purpose model of instruction are based on a quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis of a corpus of videotapes of native speakers and NNSs teaching university-level mathematics classes. This analysis and the researcher's own experience as a mathematics teacher were used to develop a characterization of what constitutes teaching discourse that is communicatively competent for mathematics, related disciplines, and perhaps other educational contexts as well. The teaching assistantship has traditionally been the prime source of financial support for graduate students. These students act as instructors, discussion leaders, laboratory supervisors, graders, and tutors for many undergraduate courses, especially in the large public universities. As the number of foreign-born graduate students has increased over the last several years, the number of nonnative-speaking (NNS) teaching assistants (TAs) has risen proportionately. Many of these individuals are excellent teachers, but many of them-in common with many U.S.-born graduate students-lack certain pedagogical skills. Like their American counterparts, the NNS TAs at times receive scant teacher training, but unlike their counterparts, they cannot rely on some innate