The Linguistics department offers all incoming doctoral students 10 semesters of support at the rate of a 35 percent TA appointment or above. This support package may include graduate teaching assignments, fellowship support, and/or research assistant positions as determined by the Department. Serving as a TA in another department will not reduce this offer, nor will summer teaching in LING. 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 Department chair makes teaching assignments in consultation with the associate chairs and executive committee.

The teaching guarantee is subject to several provisos.

  1. The Department reserves the right to withdraw teaching support from students who are assessed as making inadequate progress in the annual spring review exercise.
  2. The Department can offer only those teaching positions that its teaching budget allows, and the size of this budget is dependent on undergraduate enrollments—something that the Department has little control over.
  3. The Department reserves the right to withdraw teaching support from students whose LING teaching records are unsatisfactory (e.g., two or more semesters of poor FCQ scores).
  4. The Department strives to offer students their top choices in teaching assignments, but this consideration is counterbalanced by several others:
  • We aim to give students a variety of teaching experiences; therefore, a student who has taught a given course in the past, even with distinction, may not be offered that same course in the future. 
  • We attempt to honor faculty preferences when assigning TAs to those faculty members.
  • 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 do not guarantee a GPTI position to any student, even if the student has held a GPTI position in the past; the assignment of GPTI positions is based on multiple considerations, including (but not limited to) past teaching performance.Â