ERIC Number: EJ1471579
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Jun
Pages: 33
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0039-8322
EISSN: EISSN-1545-7249
Available Date: 2024-08-27
Exploring the Grammatical Complexity of International Teaching Assistants: A Comparative Corpus Study
TESOL Quarterly: A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and of Standard English as a Second Dialect, v59 n2 p874-906 2025
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 data consisted of 186 prospective ITAs' mock-teaching presentations collected from two ITA training courses at a large U.S. university: one higher-level course and one lower-level course. All presentations were transcribed, proofread, and built into a corpus consisting of 247,043 words. Based on the previous corpus studies, a total of 22 grammatical complexity features were selected for the analysis. Overall, the discourse of ITA mock-teaching involved a substantial number of both the grammatical complexity features commonly found in spoken conversation (e.g., finite adverbial clauses and modals) and those commonly used in academic writing (e.g., noun premodifiers and prepositional phrases). The frequency distributions of the features differed in complex ways between ITA mock-teaching and the other registers, as well as between the higher-level and lower-level ITAs. Pedagogical implications for ITA training and assessment, and future research directions are discussed at the end.
Descriptors: Grammar, Teaching Assistants, Oral Language, Language Proficiency, Foreign Students, English (Second Language), Second Language Learning, Language Tests, Graduate Students, Computational Linguistics, Writing Evaluation, English for Academic Purposes, Discourse Analysis, Phrase Structure, Verbs, Nouns, Speech Communication, Form Classes (Languages), Teaching Methods, Teacher Education
Wiley. Available from: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030. Tel: 800-835-6770; e-mail: cs-journals@wiley.com; Web site: https://www-wiley-com.bibliotheek.ehb.be/en-us
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: Higher Education; Postsecondary Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Author Affiliations: 1Department of Educational Psychology, College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA