This study aims to investigate the general practices of bilingual students’ home learning environments and to compare the variation in practices as a function of parents’ length of stay in the USA, educational levels, and household income by analyzing the results of a large-scale parental survey in an urban area in the southwestern United States, serving a predominantly Hispanic student population. The data consisted of 959 parents’ responses. The findings show that parents’ practices of engagement in students’ learning, discussions for students’ future, emotional support, students’ media consumption, disciplinary practice, and support for students’ autonomy vary in multifold ways as a function of their backgrounds. For example, while most parents, regardless of their background, were not prone to supporting children’s autonomy when deciding children’s routines at home, those with higher educational and income levels tend to more frequently participate in children’s classrooms or discuss children’s college entrance and career paths. The study discusses the implications of the findings and limitations.

Drawing on the framework of invariant measurements from Rasch measurement theory, the purpose of this study is to psychometrically evaluate the 20 language and teaching skill domains of the International Teaching Assistant (ITA) Testusing the many-facet Rasch model and to empirically explore performance differences between females and males in these domains through bias analysis. The data came from the test scores of 110 prospective ITAs on the ITA Test at a large university. Three facets (examinee, rater, and domain) were Rasch-calibrated in FACETS. Despite some misfits, overall, the data fit the model reasonably well, confirming invariant measurements and the feasibility of assessing the language and teaching skill domains concurrently to produce a single score in ITA assessment. The results also indicated that overall language skills were more difficult than teaching skills. Grammar and pronunciation skills were found to be the most difficult domains, whereas the aural comprehension skill was found to be the easiest domain. A bias analysis revealed significant differences in the four domains between the two gender groups, calling for further research for examining potential gender biases in ITA assessment.

This chapter investigates the language, culture, and the discourse of food in Japan, Korea, and the United States, as prototypical exemplars of Western culture (U.S.) and Eastern culture (Japan and Korea). We compare and contrast patterns of discursive representations of food and social interaction using the broad analytic unit ofgenre. The online cooking recipe contains complex discourse about food as well as reader/user commentary. Genre analysis of this type, including the socially organized interactional exchanges between members of socio-cultural groups, provides insights intopraxis – and can serve as robust resources for socialization of novices e.g., students of foreign language, as they come to understand the macro and micro levels of discoursequasocial practice.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock‐teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The data consisted of 186 prospective ITAs' mock‐teaching presentations collected from two ITA training courses at a large U.S. university: one higher‐level course and one lower‐level course. All presentations were transcribed, proofread, and built into a corpus consisting of 247,043 words. Based on the previous corpus studies, a total of 22 grammatical complexity features were selected for the analysis. Overall, the discourse of ITA mock‐teaching involved a substantial number of both the grammatical complexity features commonly found in spoken conversation (e.g., finite adverbial clauses and modals) and those commonly used in academic writing (e.g., noun premodifiers and prepositional phrases). The frequency distributions of the features differed in complex ways between ITA mock‐teaching and the other registers, as well as between the higher‐level and lower‐level ITAs. Pedagogical implications for ITA training and assessment, and future research directions are discussed at the end.