Job Discussion Forums

[pcruz]

Many thanks in advance, if this isn't the right place for this question please accept my apology. Would a MA in TESOL be worth all the money and time? Will the pay be more, say in Japan or Taiwan? Enjoy life and be nice?!

[shmooj]

worth it to who for what?

Certainly in Japan you have the possibility of getting a higher paid job provided you are willing to jump through the other hoops that universities and private high schools dictate. See some of PaulH and Glenski's postings about this on the Japan forum.

I did one and it was worth it to me to develop myself from a fledgling teacher into one who actually knows what he is talking about (to some degree anyway ) I also have some very long term goals that would involve language translation and ethnology for which an MA is standard fare.

It entirely depends on your long-term goals.

[denise]

I would not have gotten my current job without my MA. The starting salary was higher than the norm in Japan (although not on par with universities' salaries), and the environment (pre-university IEP) is more academic than the standard private language school.

Of course, without the MA I wouldn't be $40,000 in debt, and wouldn't have to limit my job search to countries that pay well enough to pay off substantial debt...

Like shmooj, I feel that my MA was worth it because it prepared me to teach. I taught for two years before going back to grad school, and I did OK, but I knew very little about planning entire courses on my own, keeping students motivated, assessing them properly, etc. My decision to go back for the MA was based more on a sense that I owed it to my future students to be a "master" in my field than on a desire for a better job.

d

[Ludwig]

'Pcruz', it would depend largely on what was meant by "worth all the money and time". The time is going to come and go anyway, and the same is most likely true for the money, too!

Obviously it pays off financially to complete such a course of study, as it will allow you to apply and compete for positions that tend to pay a higher salary and offer a greater range of benefits and conditions. The same holds for career development, where there will be obvious benefits. It was my MA that secured me my present post at an English language department at a university here in Hong Kong, for example.

I should add that I did not actually complete my MA in TEFL, but rather in Language Acquisition within a linguistics department proper. This is another option you may want to consider. Although this would be vastly more challenging with no background in linguistics, this is not to say it is impossible. Indeed, on my course around one half of the 30-odd total number of students had not previously studied linguistics. I completed the following modules; issues in linguistics, language acquisition (L1 & L2), empirical issues in applied linguistics, acquisition of syntax (L1 & L2), acquisition of phonology (L1 & L2), implications of L2 acquisition research for classroom teaching, anthropological linguistics, and bilingualism. The acquisition modules entail you actually designing, conducting, and analysing qualitative and quantitative experiments on language learners, both infants and adults. In addition, you complete a dissertation under a designated supervisor. As I am ultimately more interested in child language acquisition than adult second language learning, in my research thesis I examined the notion of 'Syntactic Bootstrapping', which is basically the idea that infants � at least by age 24 months � recruit evidence from the structure in which a verb appears to bootstrap themselves into that verb's 'meaning'. This is worth going into for one moment as it will demonstrate that a linguistics MA is not, as some would have you believe, overly 'theoretical'.

I looked at the infant's perception of and sensitivity to constituent structure through the employment of the 'intermodal preferential looking paradigm', which employs infant attention as the dependent variable. This is the experimental set up:

(from: Hirsh-Pasek, K. & Golinkoff, R. M. (1996) The origins of grammar: evidence from early language comprehension. Massachusetts: MIT Press.)

On one screen, a woman is shown kissing a set of keys whilst moving a ball in the foreground. On the other screen, a different woman is shown kissing a ball whilst moving a set of keys in the foreground. The child receives the linguistic stimulus of "She's kissing the keys". The children cannot select the match over the non-match only by being sensitive to segments of the full linguistic stimulus. Each screen shows a woman so the pronoun "she" can not act as a trigger. Each screen also shows the act of kissing so this too could not be a guide. Each screen also contains a set of keys; indeed, in the non-match they are somewhat prominent by being placed in the foreground.

If infants gaze longer at the matching screen, then they must be considering the structure as a whole, and the grammatical relations expressed therein. Thus this method circumvents any possible objections that the child is 'merely' picking up on a single word and/or contextual clues. Indeed, all endophoric triggers, clues and cues have also arguably been eliminated. For all but one of the linguistic stimuli, (viz., "eating a banana/cookie"), portrayed events that are relatively implausible and certainly rare: "tickling the 'phone/book", etc. Thus, infants could not rely on their extralinguistic knowledge of the world to interpret sentences that described events they had never witnessed.

The results are telling: the mean visual fixation time in seconds to the match was 2.72 and to the non-match, 2.23. The infants, then, were drawn to the match more than to the non-match, suggesting a distinct sensitivity to the constituent structure of the linguistic stimuli sentences.

Others on the course conducted research into various aspects of adult second language learning or the teaching of English to children of other languages, there are many possibilities available. The general point, however, will be clear: the general, all purpose skills that such a course install in you are in high demand from quality employers.

In a vastly more general sense, education will always introduce you to interesting aspects of the world which you had not previously considered. Through my MA I became interested in (computational models of) the evolution of complex adaptive systems and now study the communication system of the Apis mellifera (honeybee)!

[yaramaz]

Very interesting, Ludwig. How do you apply this research where you are at a university working with adults? Does this information have relevance to adult language acquisition or is it an infant thing only?

I'm planning to do my MA in curriculum development for language arts in general-- second lingo acquisition, literacy, literature, etc. Nicely well rounded and quite interesting from the looks of it.