Exploring Graduate Teaching Assistants’ Beliefs and Practices in Chinese as a Foreign Language Tutoring Program

Abstract

The current qualitative study researches graduate Teaching Assistants’ (TAs’) beliefs and teaching practices towards Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) tutoring sessions and examines the possible factors that shape and influence their beliefs about teaching and tutoring. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with three experienced graduate TAs in a CFL program at a higher education institution in the U.S. Findings revealed that TAs viewed tutoring with four major functions: review/practice of course content, remedial work, test preparation, and individualized instruction. To achieve effectiveness with these functions, they identified three types of methods for tutoring: great emphasis on explicit and implicit instruction of grammar and vocabulary, adoption of error feedback in tutoring writing, and recognition and attempted implementation of task-based teaching. Four factors have been identified to impact TAs’ beliefs: TA training, curriculum guidelines, students’ feedback, and preconceived beliefs. By exploring the TAs’ beliefs, the program administrators would know more about the gaps in their curriculum objectives and actual teaching practices, thus can better train TAs in the future, which is also beneficial to the language learners. This professional and practical motivation is the goal of the current study.