In the Winter term of AY18-19 I was the teaching assistant for LING 451/551: Functional Syntax I, a core class that is required of all Linguistics majors and graduate students. The bulk of the assessments for that course centers around analysis of problem sets. On this page I provide examples of documents I created in order to help students succeed at this difficult but crucial part of linguistics training at the University of Oregon.
Much of discussion section time for this course centered around organizing linguistic data and looking for patterns. In Week 2, in anticipation of the first problem set homework assignment, I created and distributed the following handout to give more specific guidance for how to write up analyses.
LING 451-551 Problem Set write-up handout
By mid-term time, students had completed two problem set homework assignments. This meant that we were all advancing – the students in their understanding of how to do rigorous syntactic analysis, and their TA in my sense of how much extra guidance they needed and in what areas. Accordingly, in preparation for the mid-term exam, I prepared the following handout to guide our pre-mid-term discussion section.
LING 451-551 Midterm problem set preparation handout
I had also come to wholeheartedly embrace grading rubrics. The point of these analytical assignments is to assess the quality of thought and rigor of argumentation – meaning, there is no one ‘right’ answer, and, it could be argued, it is hard to break grading down into discrete, objective units of measure. However, I found that the students were struggling to understand how to be successful on these assignments, and as a grader I was struggling to ensure that I was being fair and equitable in my grading practices. With the approval of the faculty instructor (Spike Gildea), I elaborated the assignment instructions in a much clearer set of grading guidelines. I tailored these to each individual assignment, and distributed them to students one week in advance of the homework due date. Here is an example of one such rubric, which I developed for the problem set for the mid-term examination.