Directives Usage by ITAs: An Applied Learner Corpus Analysis
Open Access
- Author:
- Reinhardt, Jonathon S
- Graduate Program:
- Applied Linguistics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 06, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Steve L Thorne, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Karen E Johnson, Committee Member
Paula Golombek, Committee Member
Celeste S Kinginger, Committee Member
Michael Mc Carthy, Committee Member - Keywords:
- office hours
genre analysis
contrastive corpus analysis
international teaching assistants
directive language
language awareness - Abstract:
- Many large American universities have developed courses for the preparation of international teaching assistants (ITAs) to teach undergraduates, which combine attention to the development of teaching skills such as lecturing and conducting office hours with the language features particular to those genres. For example, directive language is frequently found in the spoken academic genre of office hours consultations, but proves challenging for ITAs, even as its appropriate use is crucial to their success as future academic professionals. This dissertation explores the nature of directive usage by learner and expert speakers in office hours contexts for the purpose of informing pedagogy. Within a social-functional framework, a series of analyses are conducted on learner data from a corpus of directive language produced by ITAs in preparation courses participating in office hour role plays and expert data from a genre-comparable subcorpus of office hours in MICASE, the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Simpson et al., 2002). The five interrelated studies are comprised of 1) a grounded analysis to identify directive constructions, 2) a corpus-based register analysis to compare learner and expert use, 3) a genre analysis of the contextual features and text-based moves of office hours, 4) an analysis of individual usage focusing on three learners, and 5) an experimental study of the efficacy of a directives instructional unit. Findings show that compared to expert speakers, learners use fewer inclusion and independence appeals towards students, and use preferred constructions more frequently and from a smaller repertoire, often relying on multi-functional constructions like ‘you can’. Findings from the analysis of individual usage show a disconnect among how ITAs have been socialized by their schooling, what they are taught in ITA preparation courses, what they do and experience in their departments, classrooms, and offices, and the kinds of academic teaching professionals they say they want to become. Results from the experimental intervention show that instruction using a corpus-informed language awareness approach has a positive impact on use. Overall, the project has implications for ITA preparation, usage-based materials design, corpus-based pragmatics and politeness research, and the nascent field of applied learner corpus analysis.