This study examined native English speakers' reactions to nonnative primary stress in English discourse. I measured North American undergraduate students' processing, comprehension, and evaluations of three versions of an international teaching assistant's speech: with primary stress correctly placed, incorrectly placed, or missing entirely. Results indicated that when listening to speech with correct primary stress, the participants recalled significantly more content and evaluated the speaker significantly more favorably than when primary stress was aberrant or missing. Listeners also tended to process discourse more easily when primary stress was correct, but the result was not significant. These findings provide insights into how using primary stress affects international TAs' intelligibility. They also provide empirical support and suggest new ideas for current pedagogical practices that emphasize suprasegmentals in teaching pronunciation.

In February 2012, the College of Engineering created the Strategic Instructional Initiatives Program (SIIP) to transform and revitalize the core engineering courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As SIIP has evolved, we have learned that in order to achieve these goals, we must first focus on creating collaborative teaching cultures. This effort has sparked the rapid spread of Research-Based Instructional Strategies across the college and created a thriving community of faculty invested in improving undergraduate instruction. In this paper, we describe the current policies and procedures that we use to direct SIIP. In particular, we will focus on the structure of the leadership team and how we have fostered deep collaborations among faculty developers, education researchers, and engineering faculty. We conclude by presenting an evaluation of the program.

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At large, research-intensive universities, hiring specialized teaching faculty to teach their sizable populations of undergraduate students has become increasingly common. However, these instructors are often on the fray of the fabric of their departments, disconnected from conversations, committees, and decisions that have traditionally been in the realm of tenure-track faculty. In response to such lack of community, the College of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recently established a Teaching Professionals Program (TPro2) for its specialized teaching faculty. This paper reports on the inception of the program, its goals, and its outcomes to date. We also provide advice for others interested in developing such a program at their own institution.

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