Job Discussion Forums

[JaredW]

I have been lurking for a while and decided to jump right in with a question. I want to say that I check this forum everyday, and I love it, especially PaulH with his wisdom.

I am a high school English teacher in California and still in my mid- twenties. I have an BA TESOL (BYUH) and MA TESOL (National University)--both accredited univs-- and am seriosuly considering going to Japan for a University position. More money and more respect are the reasons. I have lived in Japan for two years before and passed the level 2 proficiency on the JLPT so living there is not a problem. But, with what I have read on the boards of late it seems like Japan universities are really focusing on hiring Ph.Ds for the qualiy universities now.

So, my question is if I were to get my doctorate before I move to Japan which would make me right about 30, which focus would assure me of getting a job with a quality university (literature based or TESOL/language acquisition based)? Or would a technology/English focus do well? Or would any do so long as I am well published?

Thanks again everyone. I really like this board.

[PAULH]

[PAULH]

Jared,

I would only plan on doing a PhD if you were planning to teach back in the US. I would not recommend doing a PhD just so you can get a job in Japan. the job may not be here when you get here.

You can either do a PhD (no good ones in TESOL that I know of, except Temples D.Ed degree) or an Applied Linguistics degree which in general is more valuable than a 'straight' PhD.

Its a lot of money and time to spend on something that may not deliver for you, and as i have mentioned you will end up on a job merry-go-round like me. Make sure its something you want to do, weigh up the pros and cons, your chances of getting where you want to go, before you make the leap.

There are tons of people here also in university positions like me, doing phDs on the side.

[abufletcher]

Paul's right. Diving into a Ph.D. program for the sole purpose of getting a job in Japan (or anywhere else for that matter) is folly. Honestly, you probably have as good a chance of landing a university job right now with an MA as you would later with a Ph.D. -- well at least one of the limited contract jobs. Tenured (which really just means "lifetime employment") positions are, as Paul says, scarcer and scarcer.

I happened to have lucked out and ended up being hired right off the bat with tenured status at the rank of Associate Professor, this despite only having an MA (in Applied Ling). A year later I was promoted (for largely strategic reasons) to the rank of full professor. I now have a Ph.D. but more on that below. The things that worked in my favor at the time of my hiring were that I have been teaching EFL at the university level abroad for nearly 20 years and my prior job was as Professor of Linguistics at Mexican university. I also had several publications though none I would consider serious at this point.

But I still have to say that my appointment was 99% pure luck. You also have to understand that the hiring procedures here in Japan can be as bizarre as anything from Kafta's Castle. From what I have pieced together there are at least two hiring processes (open and closed, or something like that). In the open process the position must be formally announced and is likely to solicit hundreds of applicants. In the closed process, the members of the search committee personally scout out a few possible people and submit their names. This means a greatly reduced hiring pool. This is the way I happend to get in. Actually, the position was first offered to an ex-colleague from Oman (Sultan Qaboos University) but she turned it down because as a single woman she didn't want to be "stuck" in rural Japan. So I was flown from Mexico to Japan for an "interview." Except is wasn't really an interview since they had pretty much already decided to hire me at that point but just wanted a face-to-face before we signed the papers.

Once I DID get hired of course I was immediately in on all subsequent hiring decisions. And some of the things I've seen are truly eye-opening. For example, there was the Japanese woman with a Ph.D. in Literature from Harvard that applied for one of the literature positions in our department but was rejected by the Japanese members of the department "because she went to an elite local high school." In their eyes this meant that she would never have been able to fit in with the "low flyers" on staff at out university. Japanese applicants for university positons are expected to complete a handwritten application that includes ALL their schooling including elementary school. BTW, of the 15 original members of our department only 3 (including myself) have Ph.D.s. University wide I'd say about 1/3 of the faculty have Ph.D.s. And at this point we aren't likely to hire anyone new since enrollments are falling through the floor.

In terms of marketability, I would say that for those hoping to secure a tenure-track position at an American university the "best-selling" TESOL related degrees at the moment would be in the fields of language assessment, CALL, and Bilingual Ed/Literacy (in particular as it relates to K-12 education). Take a look at the job listings on the AAAL site and you'll quicky get a feel for which fields are hot.

If I had been mercenary about the whole things I would have done a Ph.D. in assessment which is the TESOL equivalent of being an accountant. Boring as hell but good job prospects in Bush's "No Child Left Behind" America. Instead I got interested in nonnative speaker discourse and ended up specializing in the niche field of ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis. My thesis was entitled: "Co-constructing competence: Turn-construction and repair in novice-to-novice second language interacton." I'll have to be marketing myself as a TESOL generalist to land a job in the US.

As a 40 year old husband and father of three the idea of quiting my job to go back to grad school full time was definitely out! Next I looked into what it would take to do a degree in the US part-time (at a reputable university) and nearly everyone came up with the same answer: about 8 years. So that wasn't happening either. Then I started looking into UK universities. In the UK normal Ph.D. degrees do not require coursework but rather are pure research degrees. One you're in, you just start in on your research (with fairly minimul input from supervisors I might add) and sometime about 3-6 years later submit your thesis (in the UK it's a "Ph.D. thesis" and "MA dissertation). When you finish you have a degree that is every bit as respectable as any Britsih academic.

Nevertheless, many people on US search committee probably don't understand the nature of UK degrees and may be tempted to think of your degree as a "distance degree" which almost guarantees you won't be seriously considered for any job. It helps, therefore, if the UK university you choose to work with is fairly well-know in the US. I chose to do my degree through the University of York's inter-disciplinary Communication Studies program. York is particularly well known in the field of conversation analysis and has strong ties with UCLA, in fact one of my supervisors and the head of the program had both served as visiting professors at UCLA. And this connection allowed me to get an invitation as a visiting scholar (not professor) at UCLA during my recent sabbatical year which will almost certainly help on applications for tenure-track postions in in the US.

The long and short of it is this: You really have to get a Ph.D. for yourself. There are no guarantees that a doctorate will get you job either in Japan or in the US. In fact there are more and more Ph.D.'s teaching at the high school level in the US. There are very few jobs anywhere overseas that really require a Ph.D. in TESOL. I'm lucky to be able to teach courses on Second Language Teaching, Convsation Analysis, Language and Culture, and Language Assessment, here at Shikoku Gakuin University. If I were to find a job at a "better" university, I would almost certain, again as Paul says, be teaching straight EFL oral communincation classes.

Well that's more than enough for now.

[taikibansei]

[guest of Japan]

This thread is incredible. If I could find a book filled with this information I would by it. Kudos.

[Gordon]

This is a great thread. Kind of makes me wonder how the heck I got a f/t university job here. Before anyone gets thouroughly depressed by the state of uni teaching here, remember there are always exceptions, just don't count on it or depend on it.

[abufletcher]

Gordon, curious we are both here in Shikoku. Could it be that the gaijin are just a bit thinner on the ground around here?

[Gordon]

[abufletcher]

Actually, that's another dimension to hiring practices. Some places (and people) are deeply suspicious of in-country hires. Either they are afraid of getting stuck with one of the many highly eccentric expats or prefer to have a "fresh" gaijin. Who knows.

Here at SGU we've generally had better luck with language teachers we've hired from abroad than the people we hired locally. There have been some pleasant exceptions of course. That's why when it came time for us to find a new contract teacher a couple of years ago we decided to place an ad right here on Dave's ESL Cafe -- and got almost 300 applicants. To be honest a lot of those people weren't even in the running, like the woman with a degree in biology whose cover letter started with "I know I don't have a chance in hell at this job but I've been out of work for a long time and..." Still we ended up with at least 20 good candidates (including an MA from the Gulf who was planning on SAILING to Shikoku if he got the job). As things turned out our first choice did happen to be in Japan. But he was oftered a full-tme position just days before we made our (measly) offer. Our second choice was also an excellent teacher, though at 60 years old definitely a non-traditional choice. She ended up doing an absolutely outstanding job for us.

[Gordon]

I'll add to that. My university has an unwritten policy of not hiring from within Japan. I have recommended good candidates and they were turned down becuase I don't think they were gaijin enough. Absolute cr@p really.

[Doglover]

[taikibansei]

[taikibansei]

[JaredW]

Everybody, thank you for your help. I never expected so much usable information from this thread. Even my wife (Japanese) uses this information to call Japan and confirm. She has told me that she would not have thought about some of these things. So again, thank you. I have a lot of thinking ahead with little time.

Taikibansei said: