Job Discussion Forums

[quoc_viet03]

Just wanted to get some feedback on a decision I'll have to make in a few months... I am stuck between pursuing a Masters in English and a Masters in TESL (teaching english as a second language). My long-term career goals include teaching English abroad, specifically in Vietnam, but my Asiatic features may keep me from realizing these goals. I had figured an MA in TESL would look better on a resume if I'm looking for a job in Vietnam... but I don't want to be stuck with an MA in TESL if I can't find any jobs. I figured an MA in English would be nearly as good (in terms of credentials) and would also give me broader opportunities if I can't find jobs abroad. Any advice? Is an MA in English well respected in Vietnam? Which would make me seem to be a "better English speaker" to employers?

[Clutch Cargo]

I don't know about specifics re. the Vietnam situation but if you do a search on the general forum (and maybe the Korea one ) with the key words 'MA TESL' etc you'll find tons of info on this topic.
Good luck.

[fat_chris]

It really depends on what you want to study. An MA in English usually has a primary focus on literature. An MA in TESL has a primary focus on, well, TESL.

Interesting enough, one program I am considering offers an MA in English with a Concentration in TESL. Basically it's an MA in TESL. I wish they would name it accordingly.

[ClaudeRains]

Hello Quoc

I recognize your name from the Vietnam-English Club postings. I am answering because I have put a great deal of research, experience, and reflection into exactly what you're asking.

I know that you are concerned about your Asian features preventing you from finding suitable employment. If I recall, don't you speak both Vietnamese and English? If so, I would counsel patience. Now they may want blonde, blue-eyed conversation teachers. Later, they will need translators who can do more than convert Vietnamese into stiff, often odd, English prose. Advanced English writing skills are not often found among the ESL set. A teacher/translator who has them will be in high demand, especially if they also have some background in technical writing. I believe this has become the case in Japan.

An English MA typically comes in several flavors: Emphasis in literature, in creative writing, in rhetoric and composition studies, and often some form of ESL. The last is not really an English MA. It's actually a degree in Applied Linguistics. It will usually be under the English department if that college does not have a separate Linguistics area.

Having said that, let me hasten to disabuse you of your ambitions for a regular English MA. It won't teach you to think or write. It won't get you a job. It will leave your head full of irrelevant and outdated political and cultural manifestos advanced by desperate professors who have no talent or prospects themselves. It will train you to write tortured and opaque prose that working writers treat with contempt. The average English grad student is a clueless loser who's delaying the long drift into life failure by clinging to the Camelot world of literary studies. This from a former journalist who is now an English professor and a working writer.

The hard truth about this field is that there haven't been any jobs at universities for years. The community colleges now almost exclusively use adjunct professors whom they pay by the class--usually a pittance. In the United States, there is some work in Secondary English Education, ESL, and technical writing. Except for the last, these generally involve long hours with poor pay. Print journalism died a quiet death in America many years ago. Most papers now pull the bulk of their material off the wire. If you want to see your name in print, you can always find entry-level work on local man-bites-dog stories. It will pay, on average, 800 to 1300 dollars a month, and require about 80 hours a week. This may not sound romantic. It's the unvarnished truth. Before you spend good money on an English MA, you should know this: these programs exist largely to keep the current professors employed.

Across the country, English departments are struggling to respond to disgruntled students voting with their feet. The emphasis is shifting to ESL and programs in professional(technical writing). Much of it will be online. Instead of 18 eager undergraduates in a 101 class, you will face, on average, 80 online.

I tell you this so you will know your real fall-back, should you invest in an MA/PhD in English and teaching ESL abroad does not work out for you.

You're thinking, all right, Big Mouth, what should I do?

First ask yourself, why do I want to teach English abroad? Is the ESL teaching a vehicle to achieve that? Or is it the teaching itself that I want? If it's the former, find another avenue of approach to back up your ESL ambitions(which I think are sound). If it's the latter, then here's what I suggest:

English is a good bet. Shorn of America and its current follies in the world, English will remain. The 21st Century will witness the birth of a global culture, and English will most probably be its common tongue.

In the Anglophone world today, there are many eloquent and capable voices, but few are bilingual--and even fewer trilingual. Among the multilingual, only a handful have both superior writing skills and any knowledge of business or technical fields. Cobble these elements together, and you will join a tiny, tiny group, one which will always have work--and at a very favorable wage.

Investing in a prestigious resident MA TESL is a wise move. Picking up further credentials in education(second MA or a teaching certificate)is very good. Following it up by becoming fluent in Chinese or Spanish is even wiser. Remember to read and write a lot. That's how humans acquire fluidity of prose--by doing it, not by taking classes in it. Add to that a certificate in professional writing or coursework in the grammar and history of English, and you're set. You are the master of your trade.

Don't try this all at once. If you have a BA now, get a CELTA and teach ESL for a year abroad. Then go back for a stint where you pick up the MA in Applied Linguistics and perhaps some grad courses in education--learning theory, ed psych, integrating tech in the classroom, philosophy of ed are all excellent for establishing a sound foundation. Then you head off again. Only this time you stay overseas. You finish your MA in education online(There's no prejudice towards this, as many teachers can't come physically back to campus. As long as some of your hours were in residence, and it's a good university, your online MA Ed will be viewed well). Later on, you will want to pick up some English writing credentials--a certificate in tech writing perhaps. And all this time, you're working on adding other languages to your repetoire. If you want to live in Vietnam, obviously, Chinese Mandarin would be a smart move.

I would view this as a ten-year master plan. Give yourself time to enjoy life, fall in love, and make some money. Just keep your eye on where you want to be when the bell rings a decade later.

If you follow this advice, I doubt very much your features will be an obstacle to your success in Asia. I suspect both Japan and Korea are even now shifting their preference towards bilingual English instructors who have blood ties to those lands. In fact, I know some who are making well over six figures doing exactly what I've outlined above. The irony here is that, in my classes at least, the Vietnamese-Americans usually have superior English language skills compared to the students of European heritage. Since the learning curve in Vietnam seems steeper than in most countries, perhaps it won't be too long before they figure this out in HCM and Hanoi.

Remember, the era of the brain-dead backpacker teaching English conversation while stoned immaculate will soon end. As English transits from a ticket for the American dream to a green card for world citizenship, an American accent and blonde hair will no longer be de-rigueur. Everyone will speak it, locals will teach it. What you'll have will be rare and precious--the ability to practice and impart the language at its highest level. You will also be one of the few who can flourish along the fracture lines between cultures, shifting, helping to bring about mutual understanding and a new world civilization.

When that day arrives, perhaps you'll save some work for me. Why? Well...I'm a blond...

Good luck. I'm off to arrest the usual suspects

[quoc_viet03]

Dear ClaudeRains,

I am sorry if this response ends up being quite long but your reply to my question was more than I expected from this forum. I don't think I have ever gotten as much insight into teaching ESL, philosophically and practically, from any one single person until now! First off I'd like to thank you very much for spending the time to give me all that information. Secondly, I'd like to continue the conversation with some questions and potential scenarios as I am still unsure of many things.

My intentions have been, for quite some time now, to work and live in Vietnam. At first I wanted to work for one of the larger software companies in Ho Chi Minh city, as my current major is computer science, but after some soul searching I've realized I despise computer science. The reason I wanted to get an MA in English was because I love literature (English and Vietnamese) and figured it wouldn't hurt to spend 1 to 1.5 years reading literature and writing papers. I attend a state university so tuition is not as high (about $5,000 per academic year) and I have had a chance to look at the courses offered under the MA in English. A lot of them appeal to me... some deal with Singaporean and Malaysian literature, others with social aspects of particular literatures... my university is one of the more "liberal" of the state universities on the east coast. Yet with what you've said, I am now unsure of pursuing this path. Is an MA in English really that bad? I feel quite stifled where I am now, having wasted 4 years of my life buried under technical textbooks and burning my eyes out on countless programming assignments, and wish for a more "humanities"-centered course of study. I'm not sure an MA in TESL has as much of a "humanities" touch to it; to me it seems very pragmatic and career-oriented if anything. Besides the handful of literary criticism courses I have to take, the MA in English seems like a simple enough program (one of my English professors even told me the program here was quite straightforward - just write papers every once in awhile) and would look good on my resume. To be honest I am also in it for the mere appearance... having an "MA in English" followed by a "BS in Computer Science" on my resume might do more for me than an "MA in TESL" (if I do not find work abroad). My professors have told me that an MA in English would open me to more fields (excluding teaching, unless I get a PhD) as it "proves" to employers I can communicate and write decently well. The interesting courses are added incentive. However, reading over your post I am not so sure now....

The reasons I am hesitant to embark upon your 10-year program are: 1) there's probably no more than 2 more years left in my body for formal academic study.. I've reached the point in my life where being forced to read a textbook and spit back the details onto a test sickens me. I would like to start living my life and accruing experience related to what I want to do. The exception with the MA in English (I had thought) was that it consisted mostly of reading text and then analyzing it with papers - no technical mumbo jumbo! 2) anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that, despite Vietnam's almost exponential growth patterns, racism against Asian faces is extremely strong and is there to stay. I say this not only from the stories I've heard but also from my own implicit understanding of the culture. Basically, I'm saying I know Vietnamese people because a part of me is Vietnamese, and we stereotype like nobody's business!

Which leads me to the "anecdotal" evidence... I have talked to many who have worked (and are currently working) in Vietnam and almost all of them say companies and universities generally refuse to even interview teachers of Asian descent. I recently met a young man online, who was born in the US and had a little under 10 years of ESL teaching experience in the US, who ventured to Vietnam looking for a job. He couldn't find work for 5 months and only recently procured part-time work at various places. The fact that someone as qualified as him (much more so than me) can't even find decent work leads me to fear for my own future. Compare that experience to my uncle, who was born in Vietnam yet immigrated here nearly 20 years ago, who also had much of his formal education in the US. Going back to Vietnam to perform work related to his thesis (he's pursuing a PhD in Linguistics), he has told me that work for "Viet Kieu" (i.e. overseas Vietnamese) as English teachers is pretty much nonexistent. Even from my own experiences I can tell you that native Vietnamese have VERY strong stereotypes that I don't see breaking anytime soon. It is almost analogous to the situation of African-Americans in the United States. Native Vietnamese view anything Western (i.e. blonde-haired and blue eyed) as "better" and "more refined". Generally, they refuse to spend money to learn English from anyone who is not obviously caucasion. Couple this with the fact that many caucasion people are now flocking to Vietnam for the good pay and enjoyable jobs and I am looking at not-so-good prospects. The "free-market" economic forces in Vietnam dictate what is in demand and, quite frankly, native Vietnamese demand the spectacle of having "true" (caucasion) Westerners teach them English. This is why I do not want to commit myself to anything long-term in respect to TESL... not only do I abhor any ideas of continuing my formal education past 2 more years, but I feel that the market for Asian-faced teachers in Vietnam is extremely limited.

Although I would like to work in Japan or Korea if all else fails, my soul lies in Vietnam. My goal is to find stable work and one day set myself up with some sort of business and live out my days doing what it is that got me to this forum in the first place: do something positive for the people of Vietnam with my life, however I can, and experience the simple beauty of daily life as I saw it in my past visits to Vietnam. I would like to open up a vocational school in one of the poorer areas of VN (actually all areas of VN are virtually poor, despite outward appearances). Teaching English in Vietnam is a means to that end, a means that I think I would enjoy greatly (over, say, programming). I am indecisive as to how I should approach these next few months. I am graduating this December and will head to Vietnam for 6 months to teach. After that, I will have to decide whether to pursue an MA in English, an MA in TESL, or no degree at all. What are your opinions on this, given my situation?

With all that being said, I am unsure as to where I will end up in 10 years. Your 10-year plan does seem to be attractive, although I don't know if I want to spend more time in school (with the exception of the distance learning). I still have to worry about making enough to survive in Vietnam, not to mention the student loans I will have to pay back (I'm currently at $16,000). However, if my options run out I might very well try and go after something more concrete than a handful of dreams and wishful thinking (i.e. the TESL track you laid you, or something similiar). It may sound stupid but I had planned on jetting to Vietnam after getting my MA in English, teaching where I could and writing in my spare time. As the time nears to where I have to make actual decisions that might end up affecting my life in the long run, I'm fearing my ideals are the result of nothing more than youthful exuberance.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts, I'm going to have to think more carefully about this....