Job Discussion Forums

[RestiveBob]

[Deleted by poster]

[mccainjohn96]

If you have any intellectual integrity, avoid colleges or departments of education at all costs. The best MA in ESL degrees are offered by full-blown linguistics departments that offer PhDs in linguistics. But as an ESL major, the hard-core linguists will not give you much respect.

I got my MA in ESL through an English department in the US. My classes usually had a couple of students from the college of education who were working on an ESL endorsement to their teaching certificate or something, but they usually couldn't handle the work and dropped out. One in my phonology class was a PhD candidate in Reading with a 4.0 GPA. This was her last class before writing her dissertation. She threw herself at me in a desperate plea for help. I set the curve, but she made a C and broke up with me in a rage.

Well, because of the demand for ESL teachers, a few years ago the college of education at my university, and many others, started offering their own ESL programs. They're easy as pie, and an insult to the intelligence of the average English major, and they're cranking out mediocre graduates with degrees in "ESL Management," or "Educational Leadership in ESL," or some such nonsense. But the Arab deans don't see them for what they are. Heck, I think most of the Arab deans or chancellors are products of Western colleges of education themselves. So they tend to prefer hiring this ilk as department heads or deans, who make teachers, often with more rigorous degrees, waste their time on professional development busywork of the sort they did in their ridiculous education courses.

But if you really want to impress the Arabs, short of converting to Islam, get into a linguistics department that has a linguist who works on Arabic, and while you're working on your MA in ESL take some Arabic courses.