Handouts include a bibliography and activities to develop pragmatic competence. This training demonstration addresses the challenges faced by ITAs in understanding and responding to student-generated questions. Undergraduates frequently ask questions in a nontraditional format contrary to what ITAs expect. The presenters demonstrate strategies for training ITAs to cope with questions that if unrecognized or left unanswered will create instructional problems. The presenter discusses the comparative research on backchannel behavior of 10 Japanese women in a intra- and interlanguage context.
Findings indicate that backchannel behavior transfers across languages and cultures.
The researcher discusses theoretical and pedagogical implications of interlanguage studies addressing language teaching for responsive listeners. Despite the importance of hedges to express uncertainty and to diminish directness in English, research on their use has been limited, and ESL texts generally do not explicitly cover hedging. The presenter discusses the results of a study on hedging and presents implications for teaching hedging. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the nature and quantity of language learning opportunities in classroom and real world settings. The presenter compares the prosodic structure of naturally occurring teaching presentations given by Chinese, Indian, and North American TAs.