She Helped Put The Teach In Speak/Teach by Steve Sullivan Barbara Plakans speaks a little bit of several languages, which isn't surprising since the world comes through her door in the form of Iowa State's international teaching assistants (ITAs). "I meet them all," said Plakans, director of Iowa State's teaching assistant programs. "That's the fun part, meeting them when they first arrive." She meets them all because they all must enroll in SPEAK/TEACH, a language testing and teaching program for international teaching assistants. Plakans joined the Graduate College staff in 1975. In 1984, she became coordinator of what later was named SPEAK/TEACH and in 1989, she also was named director of teaching assistant programs. "The success of SPEAK/TEACH, to a large extent, belongs to Barb Plakans," said George Karas, associate dean of the Graduate College. "She is able to solicit the cooperation from so many parts of the university. She has been extremely effective." Plakans said she became interested in teaching English to refugees in Ames and then decided to get a master's degree in English as a second language. She earned the M.A. from Iowa State in 1987. "There was growing awareness of the issue of international teaching assistants who students were having trouble understanding. We realized that something had to be done and SPEAK was launched, followed shortly by TEACH," she said. TEACH is a performance-based approach to testing the teaching abilities of ITAs. Plakans helped develop it at Iowa State and has seen it adopted by other universities for their ITAs. "We realized that just the SPEAK test was not adequate. The TEACH test is designed to see how TAs perform in front of a group, talk about a subject and get students to ask questions," she said. Despite her years of experience with international TAs, Plakans was surprised at some of the findings of her recently published Ph.D. dissertation on undergraduate experiences with and attitudes toward international TAs at Iowa State. Plakans surveyed 1,819 students in 62 sections of a required communications course and conducted small focus groups with survey respondents. "A lot more students than I expected have been in classes led by ITAs," Plakans said. "Also, there were very few nasty comments about ITAs, which may be an indication of how multicultural awareness has impacted students. Even students who had problems with an ITA really wanted to explain the nature of the problem. They wanted to be constructive." _____ contact: Steve Sullivan, News Service, (515) 294-3720 updated: 3-8-95