Engineered accents: international teaching assistants and their microaggression learning in engineering departments
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it