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Characterizing Successful Classroom Discourse for NNS Teaching Assistant Training
Author(s) -
ROUNDS PATRICIA L.
Publication year - 1987
Publication title -
tesol quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.737
H-Index - 91
eISSN - 1545-7249
pISSN - 0039-8322
DOI - 10.2307/3586987
Subject(s) - training (meteorology) , mathematics education , psychology , pedagogy , sociology , linguistics , computer science , geography , philosophy , meteorology
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.