Slavic Field

[Benjamin Rifkin]

        Dear SEELANGers:

The recent discussion on our list of the problems our field faces has been
very interesting and, I believe, very productive.  I'd like to take
exception to the argument that graduate student teaching assistants should
not be entrusted with the teaching of introductory and intermediate Russian
classes, for the following reasons:

1) TAs can be very effective:  at UW-Madison our TAs routinely get very
high marks from their students (in course evaluations; in 5 of the last 6
years, TAs nominated by the UW-Madison Slavic Dept. have won College of
Letters & Sciences Teaching Prizes.

2) Graduate students have fewer and fewer sources of aid to support
themselves and pay for their graduate education; TAships are one of the few
ways we have of making sure our profession can thrive into the 21st
century.

3) Graduate students need (and deserve) the opportunity to teach as part of
their professional development.

The problem is not that graduate student TAs in our profession are poor
instructors, but rather they are often not given the support they need to
be excellent instructors.  There are many institutions which provide little
or no training for graduate student teaching assistants:  this is a recipe
for attrition, not only in the classes taught by these graduate students
when they are TAs, but also for those classes taught by the same people
after they get their Ph.D.s and become professors.  On the other hand, with
a solid teacher training program (consisting of at the very least one
teaching methods course for the examination of the process of foreign
language learning and foreign language teaching and one weekly practicum
meeting for discussion of issues in the courses TAs are currently teaching)
can provide graduate students with what they need to become great teachers
for undergraduate students in their current program and in the programs
where they'll be hired upon completion of their graduate studies.

When I joined the faculty of our department 6 years ago, our attrition rate
from first- to second-semester was 45%.  In Spring 1996, our attrition rate
from first- to second-semester was 0%, a first not only for our department,
but also for our university.  It is still difficult to get students in the
door for that first-semester class, but at least we're doing a better job
at keeping them longer once they appear.  Of course we all need to continue
our efforts to stimulate enrollment for first-semester, but we also need to
focus our attention on teacher training to reduce attrition subsequently.

Ben Rifkin


**********************************
Benjamin Rifkin
Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
University of Wisconsin-Madison
1432 Van Hise Hall, 1220 Linden Drive, Madison, WI  53706
(608) 262-1623; fax (608) 265-2814
e-mail:  brifkin at facstaff.wisc.edu