ABSTRACT

International teaching assistants (ITAs) are criticized for having ‘unintelligible’ accents for professional communication in Global North English-medium universities. Furthermore, this criticism takes a racist form as it is frequently directed at racially minoritized ITAs. This article complicates this narrative by considering how the disciplinary cultures in which ITAs work influence racist perceptions of and expectations about their accents. Drawing on interviews with engineering ITAs in Ontario, Canada, the article details how the communication conventions and gendered racism of engineering made the ITAs’ accents professionally inadequate and outlined what they should sound like. This was done through microaggression learning, the informal learning that the ITAs underwent through experiencing microaggressions based on raciolinguistic ideologies and engineering norms. The article concludes by suggesting reforms within engineering to combat the linguistic and gendered racism of the field.

摘要

在北半球英语授课的大学中，国际助教（ITA）因专业沟通时口音“难以理解”而受到批评。此外，这种批评采取了种族主义的形式，因为它经常针对种族少数的 ITA。本文通过考虑 ITA 工作所在的学科文化如何影响对其口音的种族主义看法和期望，使这一叙述变得更加复杂。这篇文章借鉴了对加拿大安大略省工程 ITA 的采访，详细介绍了工程领域的沟通惯例和性别种族主义如何使 ITA 的口音不够专业，并概述了它们应该听起来是什么样子。这是通过微攻击学习完成的，ITA 通过体验基于种族语言意识形态和工程规范的微侵犯而经历的非正式学习。文章最后建议在工程领域进行改革，以打击该领域的语言和性别种族主义。