Using Repeated Readings with International Teaching Assistants

At many universities, International Teaching Assistants (ITA) carry out much of the undergraduate teaching. Researchers have noted a variety of issues in these occurrences, centering especially around ITAs who teach using English as a Second Language (ESL) (e.g., Bailey , 1984; Kaplan, 1989; Twale, et al. 1997; Papajohn ,1999; Saif, 2006; Gorsuch, 2006; Chiang, 2009; Li et al., 2011.) Broadly speaking, this has given rise to a number of pronunciation, syntactic, cultural and pedagogical issues, which have been observed among many new ITAs in Hong Kong. (Corrigan, 2015a; Corrigan, 2015b).
Building on Gorsuch’s research (2011; 2015; 2016), an action research project involving a series of short texts for repeated readings was developed. The texts tracked simple technical topic presentations in English available in videos on YouTube and therefore are easily accessible by students. Worksheets were developed to guide students through the repeated readings exercises, which were adapted from Gorsuch’s model. Students are asked to self-report on what happened and what they learned for each of the four weekly worksheets, following Gorsuch’s use of ITA reporting. Comments from more than 500 worksheets were analyzed and emerging categories were identified, with many students self-reporting that they had improved their ability to recognize sense groups/pause groups; improve their intonation and pronunciation; and improve their reading fluency. This presentation will describe what repeated readings are, describe the participants and the university, elaborate on the action research process used in this study and demonstrate how materials were used, as well as provide a range of analysis of results.