The Role of Tone Choice in Improving ITA Communication in the Classroom

Abstract

As the numbers of international teaching assistants (ITAs) continue to increase, cross-cultural communication has become an integral part of academic life in universities. ITA instruction programs recognize that successful communication between ITAs and their students requires an ability to use language appropriate to the classroom context and an awareness of the expectations of native-speaking discourse participants. One area of teaching discourse that is frequently overlooked in this discussion is its intonation structure. This study compares one intonational feature, tone choice, in 12 parallel teaching presentations given by 6 Chinese and 6 North American male teaching assistants (TAs). Naturally occurring presentations were recorded in the classroom, and tone choices were analyzed using instrumental and auditory analysis within Brazil’ s (1997) model of discourse intonation. The results showed that the native-English-speaking TAs systematically exploited their tone choices to increase the accessibility of the lecture material and establish rapport with their students. Conversely, the typical tonal composition of the ITAs’ presentations obfuscated the information structure and frequently characterized these speakers as unsympathetic and uninvolved. These results suggest that tone choice contributes to communication failure between ITAs and their students and prompt the recommendation that tone choice be directly addressed in the linguistic and pedagogical components of ITA instruction programs.