A thematic analysis of international teaching assistants’ stigma experience in a U.S. university: English-proficiency determinism

ABSTRACT

The current study adopted a thematic-analysis approach to investigate 14 international teaching assistants’ (ITAs) stigma experience in a U.S. university. Link and Phelan’s (2001. Conceptualizing stigma. Annual Review of Sociology, 27(1), 363–385) model of four components of stigma is adopted in this article to analyze how these ITAs experienced labeling, stereotypes, separation, and status loss-discrimination. The findings suggested that some ITAs experienced stigma from domestic students, their supervisors, their departments, and even themselves. Such stigma experiences result in English-proficiency determinism that overgeneralizes ITAs’ expertise and learning-teaching experiences based on English proficiency levels alone. The practical implications for improving ITAs’ communication experiences are discussed in the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• International teaching assistants
• stigma
• English proficiency
• language ideology
• thematic analysis

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported with funding from the College of Communication Arts & Sciences and the Graduate School of Michigan State University.