Job Discussion Forums

[massivegeoff]

after being shot down about my "limited qualifications" the other week i've been looking at various MA programmes and am just wondering which ones would be more marketable in the mid east job arena:

MA Linguistics - all the usual theory stuff, including some psycholinguistics and there's a course on socio-linguistics that caught my eye.

MA Applied Linguistcs - haven't actually looked at any as such, but did a diploma in tesol at sheffield hallam uni and apparently that was the first half (the rest is mostly classroom based research).

MA Outdoor Education - all about experiential education theories etc. i like this because i'm a qualified climbing instructor and mountain leader. i'll need to be new york state certified to do it, but i'm getting a PGCE (post grad cert in education) next year, so i guess it'll be easy to do.

personally i would prefer to do the outdoor ed, but appreciate that might not be looked on kindly by a language teaching institution. is linguistics ok? or do people in the middle east insist on/specify applied linguistics, which i would prefer NOT to do?

your thoughts VS?

[Gordon]

I'm not sure what you have against applied linguistices. I am 3 months shy of my masters in that and frankly, have found it 10 times more interesting than I first thought it would be. I think linguistics would be dry, however. The applied part makes it more practical, which is what we are after, isn't it?

I can't see how a masters in outdoor ed would help you get a job teaching English.

[veiledsentiments]

The best employers will look for a related MA and the most related MA is one in Applied Linguistics or specifically in EFL/ESL.

I suspect that an MA in outdoor ed would be looked at as getting a degree in your hobby. Perhaps you should just get out of EFL and go into what you are actually interested in.

VS

[ootii]

You didn't say which country you're in. You can earn an MA in TEFL / TESL in the UK in a year. There is also a PGCE course that focuses on TESL.

The same level of qualification will probably take you two years in the States, and cost you twice as much.

Many employers will look for MA in TEFL / TESL, or Applied Linguistics plus certificate, so go for the better targeted degree.

Some programs specialize in things like educational technology and knowledge/experience of this is often an asset in the job market.

In some countries, an MA acquired via distance mode may not be recognized, so check this out if you have your sights on a particular job or a particular country.

I was attracted to the PGCE in Welsh and mountain climbing, but decided against it in the end.

[abufletcher]

A long long time ago (like when I did my MA) the route to overseas EFL teaching was an MA in Linguistics. Grad work consisted of courses in phonology, morphology, syntax, and if you were lucky pragmatics. Even if the university called it "applied linguistics" you were unlikely to have more than a single methodology course.

Back then the dominate view in language teaching was that if you had technical knowledge of language, i.e. linguistics, then you were prepared to teach. This view has changed substantially. The view embodied in many MATESOL programs today is that the craft of teaching is much more important than linguistic knowledge. The bulk of the courses in this type of program will be in TEFL methodology and learning theory with a course in pedagogic grammar and maybe listening and speaking thrown in for good measure.

The actual title of an MA doesn't really tell much of anything. Either an MA in linguistics or applied linguistics would be equally marketable in the ME. You'd have to really look over the course offerings to see how the programs really differ. Some people find straight linguistics pretty dull. I have both a BA and MA in linguistics and even I find it pretty dull. Other people like the theory stuff. Personally I think linguistics, in the US at least, has become a rather bizarre niche field. I told my daughter who is interesting in TEFL that a more rounded route might be a BA in communications and then an MATESOL.

To totally change the topic, if you're into climbing you should check out the following caving site:

http://www.saudicaves.com/

[veiledsentiments]

Hey AbuFletcher... if you daughter is really interested in teaching, another option is to get a standard BA/BSc in secondary education... a good nitty gritty program... with a major in English (they may even add ESL these days) or foreign languages.

just a thought...

VS

[ootii]

[abufletcher]

I don't think she's considering "teaching" in an American public school. I'm not sure I'd recommend that to anyone in today's bean-counter education system. I think she's more interested in teaching EFL overseas...well at least that's the plan at the moment. Initially she's thinking of coming back to Japan for a year after graduating and then if she likes it she might consider an MATESOL program.

But that's still several years away.

My point was that I think what gets taught in traditional linguistics programs is more and more marginal as far as teaching is concerned. My view of the nature of language has changed so dramatically over the years that stuff like "phonology, morphology, and syntax" is starting to look like medieval alchemy. I ended up doing my Ph.D. in a Communication Studies department and my research has more in common with sociology than linguistics. In short my current view is that language is a living set of practices and attmepts to formalize it into an abstract and autonomous system residing in the brain have missed the point entirely. We live language. We don't just speak it.

[veiledsentiments]

Abufletcher,

I wasn't really suggesting that she would want to teach in the US public schools system, but many programs do give you a good basis in classroom management and practical teaching skills. (plus who knows... in 30 years, she might want to use the skills... or teach in international schools around the world that require that piece of paper that allows you to get their big salaries...)

My advice to people is to get into programs which allow you to have some choices.

VS
(and I agree with you completely about the white tower study of linguistics... though I loved such things as pragmatics and sociolinguistics... studying the actual use of language. But even they didn't add much of use in my EFL classes... )

[moot point]

Abufletcher wrote:

[abufletcher]

As a general rule it's best never to ask a recent Ph.D. for their opinion!

Seriously, I'm not sure what can really be said in a forum like this. My field of study is ethnomethodological conversation analysis. Sociologist tend to treat this as a sub-field of linguistics but (mainstream) linguists tend to treat it as an (unfortunate) off-shoot of sociology. It has very different goals and research methods than sociolinguisitcs. My dissertation looked at the practices of interaction among Japanese novice speakers of English interacting face-to-face with other Japense novice speakers of English. Think of this as the basic crucible in which language as a form of social interaction is forged.

The basic goal is to try to understand language as a constantly situated inherently interactive phenomenon through which we go about living our lives as we "do being" fathers or mother and sons or duaghter and brothers or sisters and employees and nonnative speakers, and so on. Rather than consisting of a set of "rules" language (or at least spoken interaction) might be better viewed as a set of shared (i.e. socially learned) practices that are not necessarily different in kind from the sorts of practices that inform (not control) how we behave (and interpret the behavior of others) in an elevator.

My attitudes about language have emerged from interest in a number of overlapping fields including interactional linguistics, emergent grammar, conversation analysis, and corpus linguistics.

Like a lot of theoretical stuff the hard part is trying to understand how it might be relevant to the classroom. For about 5 years I've been experimenting with just this but certainly have not yet "figured it all out." I did present on this at TESOL last year.

A little later I'll post a bit of "poetry" that offers a strikingly different metaphor for language than the usual "Language is a machine" metaphor that underlies most formalist linguistics (which is just about the only thing that gets taught in US linguistics programs). It may not offer any specific guidance to teachers in a classroom but a modified view of what langauge is like will eventually make itself felt in what a teacher chooses to do in his or her classroom.

For example, if your view of language is based on the commonly held "Language is a Machine" or "Language is a Tool" metaphor then you're likely to see your job as being to construct in the mind of your student (brick by brick) their own copy of the L2 machine that will allow them to take the supposed "raw materials" (phonemes, lexemes, syntax) of language and construct an inexhaustable supply of target language utteranaces. You are also likely to see your first job as "building the machine" and only later "teaching them how to use langauge in real situations."

If instead you came to believe in the "Language is a River" metaphor and that "grammar" --in a vastly different understanding of that term -- is a biproduct of interaction, rather than the backbone of language, well then....

[abufletcher]

Here's the bit of "poetry" I promised:

*****

Language is like a river. The water is never the same water and the currents and eddies change constantly. But somehow, we are always able to recognize it as the same river.

What flows along the river, indeed the stuff the river is made of, is communication - sometimes muddy and sometimes crystal clear.

Just as a river carves out, over time, a channel for itself through the landscape (we call it the �riverbed�), so too does communication - through patterns of repeated actions - carve out a path that we might call grammar.

Grammar does not create language any more than the riverbed creates the river. Consequently, studying the riverbed is not the same as studying the river itself. No more than studying a footprint of an animal can be said to be studying the animal itself.

*****

Or here's some more food for thought. Maybe it would be best if we treated what actually gets said during an spate of spoken interaction as a kind of linguistic residue -- perhaps akin to the footsteps in the sand left behind by two people dancing on the beach.

[veiledsentiments]

[moot point]

Interesting metaphor, and even more interesting PhD thesis.

From the very skeletal details I understand from your research, don't you think the L1 of the Japanese speakers would have a lot of L1 interference in their interaction, where the resultant product (i.e. pronunciation/grammar/etc.) would resemble an offshoot of Japanese? I'm curious. But forgive me if I am missing the point.

Did you happen to research any Creoles in your research?

[abufletcher]

That these adult participants bring with them to the interaction a fully formed set of "first culture" practices and resources (both vocal and embodied) is undeniable. But focusing of "L1 interference" glosses over the essense of what these people are doing.

For example one section of my dissertation provides an analysis of a common phenomenon in talk by Japanese novice speakers of English, namely the addition of vowels at the end of consonant-final word, e.g. "What-o is-u zat-o shing-u?" Most EFL teachers just assume this is L1 phonological interferene and try to correct this "speech error" with pronunciation drills. My analysis shows it to be something entirely different. Specifically these participants selectively used vowel-marking as an interactional resource in three environments: 1) to initiate or manage the displayable activity of word search 2) in utterance final position to signal that some larger discourse project is underway and 3) to "survive" overlapping talk and reassert speaker rights. In essense they were using vowel-marking, which of course has its roots in the L1 phonological system, in the interactional location frequently occupied by "um" in English. So this turns out to be a discourse problem not a phonological problem.

What has always appealed to me about conversation analytic work is that is allow (requires) that we look at interaction in totally different terms than linguists are used to describing it. I did both my BA and MA in mainstream linguistics and it took me a LONG LONG time to unlearn all that stuff so I could start to see with fresh eyes.