Our co-constructed narrative detailed the epiphany of our companionship as ITAs and its effects on our en-
gagement with our own non-nativeness. We also sug- gested two practical proposals to better the learning community for the all people involved. We believe that our experience is highly unique in discussing the issue about non-nativeness of ITAs in the basic communica- tion education context, specifically in that of public speaking. However, we see two limitations that need to be carefully considered in order to further develop good understandings of the issue at hand: One is the diver- sity of ITAs, and the other is the teaching context of ITAs or narrators themselves.
First, we acknowledge the fact that backgrounds of ITAs vary highly from student to student. As Bailey (1984) noted in her discussion about the foreign TA problem, the definitions of “foreign” or “international” students in the American graduate programs are com- plicated and even unclear. For instance, some interna-
tional students, such as those from Canada attending
an American university may not necessarily consider themselves non-native speakers of English. It is very likely that the language barriers may not be as much of an issue for such international students as it is for Asian-born ITAs. Thus, the degree of confusion among undergraduate students may depend on how “foreign” English sounds to the students, regardless of the actual background of the speaker. Also, since international graduate students are pursuing their degree abroad, their living condition varies greatly. It is widely ob- served that some of them live with their family where one of, or both of spouses engage in their degree pursuit. Such students may face additional hardships of balanc- ing their personal and scholarly lives. Even among Asian students, those of particular nationalities such as
Chinese and Indian tend to have large communities in- side and outside of their school life, in which they can receive various kinds of support for their life. We also acknowledge that there are groups of ITAs, especially in science-fields, whose title is not necessarily “student” but “researcher.” Thus, the discussion presented here needs to be understood that it is a story of two ITAs pursuing a doctoral degree in communication, who were born and raised in Japan and spoke English as a com- pletely second, learned language.
Second, our experiences as ITAs of public speaking can be considered very similar because of its rarity in the American graduate program context and we suc- ceeded in developing and maintaining our companion- ship despite the geographic separation. Yet, the future research will benefit more if two ITAs attending the same graduate program who teach public speaking courses work on narrative co-construction about non-na- tiveness. This will provide more detailed, even quite subtle aspects of ITAs, other than age or gender as dis- cussed in our co-constructed narrative that may signifi- cantly affect their survival process and identity con- struction. Also, our programs did share differences such as a mentoring program and the number of semesters by which we were assigned as a stand-alone instructor. As illustrated in our co-constructed narrative, Sayaka benefitted from having a mentor program at her de- partment and a quasi-mentorship with Masaharu whose nationality indeed affected how she handled her situa- tion afterwards. Listening to voices of ITAs from the same department working on the same course may pro- vide more insights into their companionship and ideas about non-nativeness.
This study examined the critical connection between language and identity and addressed the issue of non- nativeness of ITAs. The primary goal of our discussion is to enact our voices as ITAs of public speaking so that all groups of people involved in basic communication education would benefit. For this, we proposed two ideas. One is to hold “enacting voice sessions” for TAs and a course director to have a place to share their voices. The other one is to introduce the discussion about non-nativeness of ITAs into the public speaking classroom context. The issue of non-nativeness needs to be embraced by all the people involved, rather than trying to “solve” it as a problem. It is our hope that our voices help the effective learning community grow fur- ther where students and instructors embrace diversity of individuals and move toward the same goal, commu- nication education.
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