Carmen Munoz (ed.): Intensive Exposure Experiences in Second Language Learning

Abstract

As someone who works with international teaching assistants (ITAs) in the USA, I found this collected volume to be at turns thought-provoking, useful, and perplexing. ITAs are Chinese, Indian, Korean, etc. graduate students in the sciences and humanities who come to earn graduate degrees in Canada and the USA. In order to be supported as graduate students, they work as class and lab instructors to North American undergraduates. The kinds of intensive, massed language instruction (and the proposed resulting psycholinguistic processes) the various authors of Intensive Exposure Experiences in Second Language Learning describe in immersion programs in Canadian schools and other settings are eerily apt when considering ITAs. ITAs in this context should be seen as high intermediate adult learners of English as a second language. Perhaps, for the first time in their second language learning lives, ITAs get intensive L2 instruction. This happens upon arrival in North America as part of L2-proficiency-for-teaching requirements of a given university. Presumably, the issues of practice (as defined by DeKeyser 2007), explicit instruction, and massed and spaced learning (e.g. Bloom and Schuell 1981, which was an early study done with learners of French; Dempster 1989) are just as relevant to ITAs and ITA education program design, as they are to the learners and the educational settings portrayed in Intensive Exposure Experiences.