Job Discussion Forums

[lucifer911]

ok.. linguistics is a post graduate course.
So what majors would be best for this career?

politics, law, psych, philosophy, history, counter terrorism, science, literature, english?

Which majors are good for this industry? and do employers get paranoid if counter terrorism is your major? they might accuse you of being a spy..

[fluffyhamster]

General (private language school) employers take on all sorts (as long as they're native speakers with a degree for most countries' Immigration purposes), so there doesn't appear to be a best degree to do, even if, in theory, stuff like linguistics, languages or English should be preferred by the employers at least. For most graduates some sort of TEFL certificate usually suffices. If you want however to one day partake of certainly the better pay and perks in international schools (which obviously isn't TEFL), or to have much of a career in teaching whatever back home, then it would make sense to major in education or get state-qualified teacher status through some sort of postgrad qualification (e.g. a PGCE in the UK).

http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=68027

[GambateBingBangBOOM]

Linguistics is not a post-graduate course. You can do an undergraduate degree in Linguistics. (Other than Applied Linguistics... that's language teching, in this case), You NEED an undergraduate degree in Linguistics to get a masters degree in linguistics.

Note that if you decide that you want to be able to get a post-undergrad qualification in teaching (like for elementary, junior or senior high) then you need to have 'TEACHABLES'. This means majors in courses taht you can teach at the high school or junior high school level (math, English, French [in the case of CDA], etc).

So you should keep that in mind.

[fluffyhamster]

Thanks for picking up on a few points I missed, GBBB (I for one seem to have an unerring ability (fault?) to ignore incorrect or irrelevant assumptions in order to concentrate on the essentials ). It's certainly important and worth stressing that if one is thinking of doing any sort of teaching, one should indeed try wherever possible to do a major or even minor in something that there is likely to be or still be a demand for in state schools, as a school subject.

Another thread that might be of interest to the OP:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?p=724024#724024

[jpvanderwerf2001]

A BA in English seems to be a good place to start.