Teaching Assignment Model

The Linguistics department offers all incoming doctoral students 10 semesters of support at the rate of a 50 percent Graduate Assistantship appointment (20 hours/week). This support package may include graduate teaching assignments, fellowship support, and/or research assistant positions, as determined by the Department. Teaching assignments are made on a semester-by-semester basis. Each semester, students are asked to apply for assignments by expressing their preferences and their qualifications for each preference. The Associate Chairs make teaching assignments in consultation with the Department Chair.

The teaching guarantee is subject to several provisos:  The Department reserves the right to withdraw teaching support from students who are assessed as making inadequate progress in the annual spring review exercise or from students whose LING teaching records are unsatisfactory (e.g., two or more semesters of poor FCQ scores). Furthermore, the Department can offer only those teaching positions that its teaching budget allows; the size of this budget is dependent on undergraduate enrollments and is determined at levels above the department.

The Department strives to honor student preferences in teaching assignments, but these considerations are counterbalanced by several others:

• We are committed to providing qualified TAs for each course. We attempt to match the position to the student’s expertise and abilities, even if the resulting assignment is not the student’s preferred assignment.
• We aim to give all students a variety of teaching experiences; however, sometimes this results in repeated assignments for some students in any given semester.
• We attempt to honor faculty preferences when assigning TAs to those faculty members.