Job Discussion Forums

[esl_prof]

Where did you earn your degree, and why did you choose your particular school? In your experience, what were the advantages and disadvantages of going that route? How has having earned a degree from a non-Anglophone country or university helped or hindered your career?

I'll share my answers after others have had a chance to weigh in.

[suphanburi]

[esl_prof]

[esl_prof]

Looks like this thread isn't going to get a lot of replies, so I'll go ahead and weigh in.

I earned my MA TESL degree from a university in Puerto Rico that is accredited by the U.S.-based Middle States Commission on Higher Education. While Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, it is essentially a Spanish-speaking country and most courses outside of the English department at this particular university are taught in Spanish.

I chose this program because:

1) Having just spent two years as a volunteer English teacher in the neighboring Dominican Republic, I was looking for an opportunity to extend my stay in Latin America for a few more years.

2) My wife, who is from the Dominican Republic, was looking for an opportunity to complete her undergraduate degree at a Spanish-speaking university while I pursued my MA. This school had an undergraduate program that would allow her to do just that.

3) The program I enrolled in pretty much guaranteed me that I would be able to teach undergraduate English classes.

Pros
+ Lots of college-level teaching experience: I, and most of my classmates, took advantage of the option to teach up to 9-credit hours of first-year ESL courses each semester while working on our degrees. In addition, once I was there and had opportunities to network, I was able to get hired for some pretty cool side jobs.
+ Living, working, and studying in Puerto Rico helped me to improve my Spanish language skills (I took a couple of graduate electives in the education department, which were taught in Spanish).
+ I'm much more proficient at working with students whose formal education has not adequately prepared them for college-level work.
+ Unlike the Dominican Republic, where my students eagerly took whatever I dished up in the classroom, Puerto Rican students--at least in the university context--tended to be largely aloof and disinterested in what they perceived as largely a hoop-jumping exercise to get their degrees. In short, teaching there forced me to innovate and become a better teacher.
+ While having a degree from a Puerto Rican university in and of itself hasn't necessarily given me any advantages over degree holders from universities on the U.S. mainland, it does--at least--distinguish me from the crowd of local applicants who have mostly earned their MA TESL degrees from Local City U. In other words, prospective employers tend to take notice of someone who has taken a somewhat different path.

Cons
+ The program was probably not as academically rigorous as similar programs based in the U.S. (or other anglophone countries).
+ Some of the methods we were encouraged to use in the courses we taught were pretty old school (e.g., grammar translation), so there was a bit of a disconnect between how were taught to teach in graduate classes and how we were expected to teach our own courses.
+ English language education is highly politicized in Puerto Rico--no surprise, given its colonial context--which, as an American instructor, made things a bit awkward at times.

Summary
Following my graduation and departure from Puerto Rico, my career took me away from ESL for over a decade before returning to the profession once again (about five years ago) via the U.S. community college system. In hindsight, my decision to study in Puerto Rico was largely a choice to trade off academic rigor for hands-on cultural and teaching experience. The latter has been significantly useful in my career both within and beyond the TESL profession. As to the former, well . . . I've been playing a lot of catch-up for the last few years, but I seem to be keeping up with my colleagues just fine.

Up to this point, having an MA TESL from a non-anglophone university hasn't ever been an impediment to finding work and, as I mentioned earlier, does catch the attention of prospective employers as I'm often one of the few local applicants who hasn't earned my degree from Local City U. Many of my former classmates (from the mid-90s) ended up teaching at King Fahd University and, at least one that I am aware of, is currently teaching in Oman, so had my career gone a different direction I suspect I would have done okay.

I'm curious to hear the experiences of others who have pursued their graduate degrees from non-anglophone countries or universities.

[suphanburi]

My degrees (from non anglophone regions & graduate level) were from:

Montreal Canada (francophone university).
Seoul National (S.Korea (international program)).
Chulalongkorn University (Thailand (international program)).

the other 2 graduate level degrees were from English speaking universities in Canada.

All 3 undergraduate degrees were earned in Canada but at different universities and in different fields.

As I mentioned above, having earned graduate level credentials usually is about the research and publications and less about the coursework.

I have never had any door closed due to having earned off-shore graduate level degrees. The connections that I have made however have opened a lot of opportunities (being invited to various research teams, co-authoring publications and books, invited guest speaker, etc.) that would have otherwise not been even on the table.

.

[LaLaDivina]

I think this is very enlightening esl_prof, thanks. I've always wondered if it really is a horrible idea to have an MA TESOL, or similar degree, from a non-anglophone country. I'm currently trying to get funding to start an MA in Translation with TESOL at a British university, so no issues there, but in the future I've thought about getting an MA in bilingual or language education, perhaps from a non-anglophone country. Things to ponder.

[esl_prof]