Various university programs focus on introducing international teaching assistants to life in the American university, as well as prepare them to teach undergraduate classes.

According to Ghislaine Kozuh, Director of the International Teaching Assistant Program at the University of Texas at Austin, ITA preparation and performance evaluation at that institution is achieved through a variety of perspectives.

"Non-native speakers of English are required to pass or conditionally pass an oral proficiency assessment. This is an in-house live interview modeled on the SPEAK (Spoken Proficiency English Assessment Kit); but, the material is field-specific, and thus tailored to each student's major field of study. "Students who conditionally pass the oral assessment must enroll in a semester-long ITA course (which carries graduate credit). ITAs in the ITA course are assigned to observe an experienced TA in their field, and to write an observation report in addition to sharing impressions in a class discussion. Also, they are required to interview an experienced TA, write a report, and discuss in it class. Second, ITAs in the course and in our pre-semester orientation, do practice teaching (microteaching) in small groups that have two or three undergrads (whom we pay to participate). The undergrads are asked to participate actively, and to give feedback at the end of the lesson. Third, during our Orientation, we have a panel discussion in which experienced TAs and ITAs discuss various issues with undergraduates.

At the end of the course, "students are evaluated by means of a videotaped lesson that they teach. The panel evaluating the taped lesson consists of trained raters, a faculty member from the student's department, the instructor and others, explained Kozuh.

Technological enhancements at the UT-Austin program include TEAM (Technol-ogy Enhanced Accent Modification) developed by Arthur Schwartz of the University of Cleveland, said Kozuh. "This pairs a native-speaking tutor with a TA for a minimum of 20 hours. We train the tutors who hail from second-language acquisition courses, or speech pathology courses," she explained.

Nancy Joy Allchin, SPEAK Test Coord-inator/ITA Fluency Instructor at West Virginia University, also uses technology to enhance ITA training. "I have experimented with a new technique__e-mail journaling. I invited my ITA speech and pronunciation students to join the project, and collected e-mail addresses of those interested. I initiated with one message, sent to everyone, which discussed several ordinary topics such as the snow in Morgantown, favorite places to travel, etc. When they responded, I responded individually__often showing them by my response the more common vocabulary or structure for expressing the ideas they wrote about, Allchin explained.

"My students lead very busy lives as graduate students and ITAs, and rarely have the time to spend developing the friendships with American students that would help them practice conversational English on a daily basis. Everyone checks their e-mail daily, however, and this is a conversational tool that takes only a few minutes per day. I hope to find American students to be Śkeypals' with my ITA students," Allchin added. In Iowa State University's Graduate College SPEAK/TEACH Program, coordinator Felicity Douglas explained that its ITA preparation includes an orientation to the U.S. classroom for all new ITAs where participants "discuss issues such as undergraduate characteristics, what the undergraduate students expect in the classroom and of their teachers; and TA roles__and how that involves a midway position between faculty and students."

Also introduced is the issue of "how most U.S. undergrads are not thrilled to have international people as their teachers because they assume it will be harder for them to do well in that class, and things the ITAs can do at the class meetings to allay these fears and to aid in communication," explained Douglas. "We have a series of semester-long courses for ITAs who don't fully pass the oral-proficiency tests that are mandatory before their departments assign them teaching duties," said Douglas, and continued that "departments do other things such as have them share office space with American teaching assistants, or have a buddy system where they are supervising a lab with a TA from the United States. Sometimes a department will provide money for us to set up weekly small discussion-groups with ITAs and a U.S. grad student to practice English and discuss cross-cultural issues," added Douglas.

At the University of Nevada-Reno, Shirley Nelson, Director of Graduate School Instructional Development, explained that its programs for ITAs "are included in our general seminars for all TAs." The campus-wide training program there has six major elements: a pre-semester training workshop, classroom observation and videotaping, consultations, TA enhancement meetings, a policy manual, and yearly TA awards.

Special help is available to international TAs with presentation skills, linguistic practice, and cultural concerns. There are also seminars specially designed for international teaching assistants which focus on topics including teaching-assistant concerns survey, helpful hints for ITAs, questioning skills, characteristics of good explainers, vocabulary to promote TA/student interaction, and classroom-presentation skills. Kathleen Smith, Coordinator of TA Programs at University of Georgia's Office of Instructional Support and Development, said "we try to include the preparation of international TAs as part of the preparation required of all new teaching and laboratory assistants with instructional responsibilities, while still trying to support their development of classroom communication abilities."

A three-tiered approach to ITA training within that program includes two levels specific to the needs of ITAs (language and communication within the context of the university) and the third level specific to the needs of career development of both international and American TAs__during the time at the university and beyond, when they begin their own careers after graduation.

At Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, ESL specialist Catherine Crowley and her colleagues coordinate collaborations between classes of various levels of ESL learners and mainstream undergraduate classes. "In a listening and speaking course for both ITAs and university ESL students, I designed several projects to address listening and speaking in authentic contexts," explained Crowley. In collaboration with instructor Chris Wahl at Wright State, Crowley explained that international graduate students designed a presentation they called Entering the University for Inter-national Students, which presented information about what newly arrived international students should know about the university, and presented it to the beginning ESL university students.

"This presentation not only benefited the beginning ESL students__who truly need this kind of info and advice__but it also taught my (advanced ESL) students many strategies for presenting to a class. Their presentation was at the Ślow-affective' level because they were the experts in this situation. Through this, they learned how to deal with important considerations such as audience awareness, classroom logistics, and the value of visual aids for second-language speakers. "In another instance, in conjunction with English 101 instructor Jeannette Horwitz, my students participated in a panel discussion. For this project, the students in both classes watched a popular talk show, then were assigned to groups in which they were to represent different parts of the population who were either for or against this show. The international students were placed in groups with the native speakers, and the task was to design an argument. Then, one member from each group was elected to be on the panel where they presented their viewpoints. The rest of the students became the audience and were able to pose questions to the panel. My students reported to me that even though they didn't speak up a lot, they thought it was a great experience. They got to participate a very real classroom situation__negotiation, argument, group work, collaboration."

And finally, according to A. Darlene Panvini, Coordinator for the International Teaching Assistants Program at the Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University, a program's ultimate goal for its international teaching assistants is "to be viewed as not a Śproblem,' but as an asset to the university."