Foreign Teaching Assistants at U.S. Universities: Problems in Interaction and Communication

Abstract

occurred) and a for item two (indicating that they believed that it had). However, several of the students found the first sentence to be ambiguous and interpreted it in a way different from what had been anticipated. In the class discussion following the test, they explained that they had inferred that Mary was dead-killed by someone, but not by Tom. That is, by placing contrastive stress on Tom in their reading, rather than reading it as unmarked, they identified an interpretation that had not been previously considered. As this example illustrates, there are advantages to be found in using testing techniques for instructional purposes. Requiring students to make conscious choices, as they had to in this testing format, made it possible to discover and identify problems, ambiguities, and alternative interpretations which might otherwise have gone undetected.