Program Overview

English as a Second Language Master's

Program Overview

The Department of Linguistics offers an MA in Teaching English to speakers of other languages, which prepares students for careers in teaching English as a second language and/or foreign language and language arts instruction for K-12 (with additional certification and coursework from the College of Education).

Program Details

• Program Type: Master of Arts (M.A.)
• Format: On Campus
• Estimated Time to Complete: 2 years
• Credit Hours: 36

Program Description

The MA in ESL specifically prepares students for careers in teaching English as a second language and/or foreign language and language arts instruction for K-12 (with additional certification and coursework from the College of Education). Our programs serve as an excellent foundation for doctoral studies in Linguistics and other language-related fields, such as speech pathology, deaf education, audiology, or the teaching of English as a second language.

Marketable Skills

• Pedagogical practices
• Assess for reading, writing, speaking, and listening
• Multi-cultural/diversity competencies
• Curriculum design and lesson plan development
• Teach and learn using technology

Program Highlights

• The research programs of individual faculty members are aimed at such corpora creation and analysis using current theories from poetics and discourse analysis, variation and change, language learning, morphosyntactic and syntactic analysis, and phonetic and phonological analysis.
• UNT linguists sit on editorial boards or serve as review editors (Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, Himalayan Linguistics, Journal of South Asian Language and Linguistics, International Journal of American Linguistics)
• Our practicum in ESL is often available at an international venue.
• Students will have the opportunity to get practical experience designing and implementing ESL instruction, including actual practice in the teaching of English speakers of other languages.
• Students can participate in student‐led reading groups of articles and discussions of research projects in linguistics related to thesis topics.

Career Opportunities

• Advertising
• Codes and code-breaking
• Language education
• Law — forensic linguistics
• Marketing
• Speech — language pathology and audiology

Courses

• Research Design in Linguistics (3 hrs)
• Sociolinguistics (3 hrs)
• Corpus Linguistics (3 hrs)
• Phonology I (3 hrs)
• Teaching English as a Second Language (3 hrs)
• Second Language Acquisition (3 hrs)