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For over four decades, International Teaching Assistants (ITAs) have faced criticism by undergraduate students for their linguistic and teaching abilities. One area of research on ITAs' linguistic abilities focused on their pronunciation and generally revealed non-standard patterns of segmental and suprasegmental features (Anderson-Hsieh et al., 1992; Kang, 2010) that can result in lower comprehensibility for ITA speech (Hahn, 2004; Kang et al., 2010). ITAs' discourse intonation (i.e., the role of intonation in natural interaction), and prominence (i.e., stress on a syllable to mark it as salient in a phrase or sentence) in particular, has been found to differ from native-speaker standards. Prominence plays an important role in signaling the structure of information. TAs who speak American English as their first language (ATAs) generally mark new information as prominent and given information as non-prominent (Pickering, 1999; Wennerstrom, 1997). ITAs, however, show irregular patterns of prominence marking in their classroom speech, making the processing of their speech more challenging for their students: They mark multiple words as prominent, pause in the middle of tone units, misplace prominence on given information, and miss prominence on new information (Gorsuch, 2011; Hahn, 2004; Pickering, 2018; Tyler et al., 1988). But research on native and non-native pronunciation has traditionally used elicited data consisting of words and sentences, rarely using extended discourse to study the interactions between pronunciation features and communicative functions of language. This dissertation has taken a register approach in developing a corpus of teaching assistant classroom speech, which is prosodically annotated to enable studies of the relationship between prosodic features such as prominence and discourse-level aspects of language such as information structure. This dissertation begins with an overview of ITAs' linguistic performance and communicative competence as a framework for ITA training, followed by a discussion of the corpus approach to studying prosody in classroom speech. The interactions between information structure and discourse intonation are covered in the second chapter using two models of discourse intonation. The dissertation then includes three papers. The first describes the steps involved in the design, compilation, and development of the Corpus of Teaching Assistant Classroom Speech (CoTACS). The creation of this corpus was motivated by the need for developing prosodically-annotated corpora of non-native speech in instructional settings, for use in both research and teaching. CoTACS, once publicly available, will enable more studies of ITA speech to identify prosodic characteristics of their speech that can impact undergraduate students' comprehension. It will also allow for more robust replications of previous studies that used small datasets, in order to validate previous findings. The first paper describes the register perspective taken in designing the corpus and analyzing the domain of instructional speech by TAs, followed by details of the sampling methods, speakers' demographics, data preparation, orthographic transcription, audio-transcript alignment, prosodic annotations, and addition of part-of-speech (POS) tags and metadata to the corpus files. The paper ends with a discussion of the composition of the corpus and plans for its availability. The second paper in this dissertation presents a proof-of-concept study of prominence placement in ITA and ATA speech. Using a sample of CoTACS data, this paper showcases how the corpus can provide data for research on prosodic features such as tone units, prominence, and pauses in speech by TAs from different linguistic and disciplinary backgrounds. Through a series of examples, this paper reports a qualitative analysis of speech from five ATAs and 10 ITAs. Findings document the patterns of similarities and differences between these two groups in their use of prominence to mark given and new information. The potential impact of these prosodic choices on information structure are discussed with respect to Brazil's (1997) model of intonation. The third paper introduces the potential of CoTACS to provide teachers and learners support for pronunciation instruction, using the findings from a small-scale study of prominence placement with data taken from six CoTACS speakers. The chapter also explores using corpus approaches to determine teaching targets for prosody, introducing activities for using CoTACS to teach intonational features such as prominence. The implications connect the use of CoTACS to teaching pronunciation to learners from a variety of L1 and disciplinary backgrounds. The dissertation ends with a discussion of implications for further research in second language pronunciation and corpus linguistics, as well as implications for teaching based on the results regarding prominence placement in ATA and ITA speech and using CoTACS data for developing teaching materials. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This paper provides a system that helps diagnose and address the specific challenge to cellists of intonation in any passage. Learning to play consistently in tune is essential for every cellist. In the over three hundred years of cello history, teachers have tried approaching the topic from a variety of perspectives. While each technique is useful in its own right, there is scant attention to how they work together. Viewing intonation through its component sub-skills is the first step toward integrating existing exercises and paving the way for further advances in pedagogy. The following paper categorizes training techniques according to the sub-skills of playing consistently in tune. This approach makes the learning and teaching of intonation manageable and approachable to cellists at all levels. What we do before the note, How we play the note, What we do after the note, and Putting it all together are the four broad categories of sub-skills identified. Within each of these sections, relevant exercises are presented and their efficacy explained. Examples are drawn from a wide range of sources including music education, my own educational experiences, music psychology, the Alexander Technique, cello pedagogy, professional cello teachers’ responses to a questionnaire, physiology, and neuroscience. By integrating published research in these areas, this paper provides a more comprehensive understanding of intonation. Instead of a wealth of techniques each claiming to resolve the challenge of playing in tune, the introduction of sub-skills allows for a methodological approach to intonation pedagogy.

This paper seeks to provide a practical approach to understanding and executing intonation for the developing or advanced double bassist. Many of the ideas illustrated here are applicable to any player of a non-tempered instrument, but specific exercises will be presented within the context of the contrabass. "Intonation" is a frequently mentioned concept within standard classical music training, yet many musicians have never learned the basic principles behind the tuning systems on which they rely daily. Instead, "perfect intonation" is a vague ideal, a goal which is constantly sought but never quite reached, namely because the musicians themselves are not truly aware of what they are pursuing. In preparation for this paper, I managed to interview a small number of musicians about the way in which they learned to play in tune. Out of the interviews I conducted, I reached the conclusion that this topic is not thoroughly addressed in many educational contexts. The following paper represents an effort to elucidate this complex topic by exploring and comparing the tuning systems of "just intonation" and "equal temperament," focusing on a tangible approach to playing just intervals on the contrabass through awareness of the overtone series and the natural harmonics of the open strings.

Manifestations is a composition in three movements, scored for an octet comprising the following instruments: flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet in B♭ (doubling bass clarinet), trumpet in C, tenor trombone, piano, marimba, violin, and cello. This piece serves as a vehicle for demonstrating the use of pitch adjustment software to incorporate microtonal aspects into a fixed-media piece. By utilizing this software, acoustic instruments may accurately provide pitches outside of the traditional twelve-tone chromatic scale in ways that impart expressiveness and/or provide structural significance without any physical alteration or extended techniques. The microtonal elements of this piece are incorporated via three primary techniques, which I call controlled beating, linear inflection, and centstonic modulation. In my paper, I describe what each of these techniques entails and how they relate to and inform the piece. I also outline the workflow I used for producing a recording of this piece so that this process may be applied to works with similar concepts in the future. The aim of Manifestations is to invite acoustic instruments into the novel pitch territory of microtonal music. However, despite the relatively new pitch elements, this piece is not entirely reliant on the novelty of these elements for its musical substance. Rather, it was my intention to build upon the contemporary repertoire by applying the techniques described herein to conventional compositional principles. For a majority of the piece there are other forces at work that are the primary focus, such as the durational pattern in the first movement and the “diamond” motive in the second, which are articulated and clarified by the microtonal elements. It is this careful synthesis that I believe will strengthen my mission of advocacy.