Cultural and linguistic miscues: a case study of international teaching assistant and academic faculty miscommunication

Abstract

This case study explores the communication patterns between Chinese international teaching assistants (ITAs) and academic faculty in a Mathematics Department. The faculty highly esteemed the ITAs as excellent mathematicians, but generally attributed negative causes to their behavior outside the realm of mathematics. The ITAs’ polite deference and concern for maintaining appropriate face for unequal status interactions manifested itself as silence and avoidance in formal contacts with faculty, both in and out of the classroom. Most faculty interpreted this behavior as lack of motivation, isolationism and unwillingness to cooperate in ITA instructional assignments, or in improving their English. The students attributed their own behavior to stressful situational pressures and to the mixed messages they received from the faculty about the amount of time they should devote to English. Results are interpreted as supporting Gumperz’ theory of conversational inference (1982: Gumperz, J. (1982). Discourse strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1992: Gumperz, J. (1992). Contextualization and understanding. In A. Duranti, & C. Goodwin (Eds.), Rethinking context (pp. 229–252)), and of attribution theoretical approaches. Implications for ITA training programs are discussed.