A comparative study of the teacher talk of first-year Spanish native and non-native teaching assistants

This qualitative study focused on the speech adjustments that native and non-native Spanish speaking teaching assistants use in their elementary Spanish classes. In addition, this study analyzed the differences and variations in classroom language of both groups of teaching assistants. This interest came from the researcher's desire to investigate the classroom at its most fundamental level--discursive interactions between teachers and students.; The purpose of this study was to identify and describe the differences, if any, between the teacher talk of Spanish native speakers and non-native speakers in university elementary Spanish courses. The central research question was: What effect do linguistic differences between native and non-native first-year Spanish teaching assistants have on the discourse features of their teacher talk Spanish 1 classes?; The subjects were five female teaching assistants--three native Spanish speaking language instructors from Argentina and two non-native Spanish speaking instructors; one from the United States and the other from Portugal. These five participants were literature majors in their mid-twenties.; All subjects were recorded five times as they taught Elementary Spanish in two consecutive semesters. A modified version of the scheme developed by Tharp and Gallimore (1989) in Language-Promoting Assistance was utilized to count the amount of occurrences of each interactional exchange codified in the scheme. Moreover, written speech samples taken from transcriptions made from 25 class periods were selected and analyzed to corroborate the linguistic interactions between the instructors and their students as they naturally occurred in the classroom setting. The duration of each class was 50 minutes.; The first four classes of each instructor were audio-recorded and the fifth was video-recorded. For the sake of objectivity, the researcher took field notes as he observed the third and the fourth classes, and likewise interviewed the teachers immediately after class. These interviews consisted of 11 questions, and were audio-recorded and transcribed by the researcher.; The results of this study suggest that the two groups of subjects have advantages and disadvantages in the way they make use of discourse strategies for constructing students' oral participation in the classroom. An implication of this research is that the usage of these linguistic strategies to scaffold conversation does not happen naturally; therefore, on-going teacher training is vital to help TAs become aware of the pedagogical and linguistic implications of their classroom language as they teach elementary Spanish.; Given the small size of the sample in each of the two teacher categories, the conclusions reached here can only be suggestive. A much larger sample would be required to come to any firm conclusions regarding the research questions of this study.