The Department of Language Studies is committed to providing valuable research and work experience for undergraduate students.
There are many opportunities to get involved with linguistics outside the traditional classroom setting, including student groups and opportunities to engage with faculty research through ROPs and research assistantships.
On this page:
- Course-Specific Opportunities
- ROPs
- Student Groups-Related Opportunities
- Research Assistantships / Other Paid Opportunities
- Other Past Opportunities
Current opportunities: Apply to Work-Study roles for summer 2024.
Course-Specific Opportunities
- Public lecture on linguistics at local community center (as part of LIN352: English Language Linguistics in the Public Sphere, taught by Prof. Ai Taniguchi)
ROPs
Faculty members in Linguistics frequently offer ROPs (LIN299H5, LIN299Y5, LIN399H5, LIN399Y5). Enrolment in ROPs is limited and requires faculty/departmental approval. Bursaries may be available for students enrolled in an ROP. For more information on available ROPs in Linguistics or other disciplines, please visit the Experiential Education Unit website.
We accepted applications for Summer 2024/ Fall 2024/ Winter 2025. Applications via the ROPAPP closed at 11:59pm on Mar. 4, 2024.
- Prof. Emily Atkinson: “Development of Children’s Sentence Processing Mechanisms”
- Prof. Emily Atkinson: "Do Second Language Learners Process Sentences in the Same Way as Native Speakers?"
- Prof. Avery Ozburn: "Language Profiles Project"
- Prof. Avery Ozburn: "Phonetics and Phonology of ATR"
- Prof. Jessamyn Schertz: "Sounds of UTM: Speech Production and Perception"
- Prof. Michelle Troberg: "Up, Down, Away, Flat, and Clean: Results Across Languages"
- Prof. Lingzi Zhuang: "Learning Indigenous Language for Globalized Scholarship: Nepal Bhasa in Toronto"
For a detailed description of each research project, please browse the file below:
Check the ROP timeline for deadlines and more information.
Past projects and faculty supervisors include:
- Learning phonological patterns (Prof. Avery Ozburn)
- Machine learning meets meaning (Prof. Barend Beekhuizen)
- Mississauga Englishes (Prof. Jessamyn Schertz)
- Multiethnolects in the GTA (Prof. Derek Denis)
- Resultative secondary Predication in Medieval French / La predication secondaire résultative en français médiéval (Prof. Michelle Troberg)
- Trilingual language development and maintenance (Prof. Mihaela Pirvulescu)
- Vowels in African Languages (Prof. Avery Ozburn)
- Zooming in on language change (Prof. Derek Denis)
Student Groups-Related Opportunities
Research Assistantships / Other Paid Opportunities
Faculty members in linguistics often have research assistantships, volunteer positions, or work-study positions available. You can find further information about these positions by:
- visiting the CLN website (for work-study and paid research assistantship positions)
- reaching out to individual faculty members to see if opportunities are available if you have a particular interest in participating in their research
Past projects include:
- Children’s Processing of Singular they (Prof. Emily Atkinson)
- Heritage Language Acquisition and Maintenance in a Trilingual Context (Prof. Mihaela Pirvulescu)
- Language experience and linguistic skills among multilingual learners in higher education (Prof. Jeffrey Steele)
- Language Profile Project (Prof. Avery Ozburn)
- Multicultural Toronto English: Identity and Ideologies (Prof. Derek Denis)
- Priming Children’s Interpretation of Sentences in Ambiguous Contexts (Prof. Emily Atkinson)
- Speech perception and production experiments in the Sounds of UTM Lab (Prof. Jessamyn Schertz)
Other Past Opportunities
- Computing lexical-semantic diversity across 1200 languages (UTEA project, Prof. Barend Beekhuizen)
- Exploring the social meanings of Multicultural Toronto English (Jackman Humanities Institute Scholars-in-Residence program, Prof. Derek Denis)