Program Overview
The Master of Arts in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) program at University of North Texas provides students with the skills to teach English as a second language and prepare them for careers in education, government, law, and more. The program focuses on research-backed methods for acquiring languages and includes a practicum in ESL, giving students practical experience in teaching English to non-native speakers. The program also offers opportunities for students to engage in research and participate in a variety of student-led activities.
Program Outline
Degree Overview:
The Master of Arts (M.A.) in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) is a 36-credit hour program offered on campus at the University of North Texas (UNT). It is designed to prepare students for careers in teaching English as a second language (ESL) and/or foreign language and language arts instruction for K-12 (with additional certification and coursework from the College of Education). The program also serves as a foundation for doctoral studies in second language acquisition and the teaching of English as a second language. The program focuses on developing students' skills as educators and utilizes research-backed methods for acquiring languages to teach English to non-native speakers. It provides broad training in all core areas of linguistics and prepares students for challenging careers in a variety of industries, including:
- Bioinformatics
- Education
- Government
- Law
- Natural language processing
Teaching:
The program offers courses on:
- Second language acquisition
- Pedagogical approaches to English grammar
- Methods and practicum in teaching English as a second or additional language
- English language variation and change, including varieties of English spoken worldwide Students have the opportunity to gain practical experience designing and implementing ESL instruction, including actual practice in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
Careers:
A degree in Linguistics makes students competitive for jobs in:
- Advertising
- Codes and code-breaking
- Language education
- Law — forensic linguistics
- Marketing
- Speech — language pathology and audiology Some of the activities from this research network include:
- Linguistics Colloquium
- Linguistics in Motion Film Series
- Linguistics Summer Institute
- Linguistics Circle
- Linguistics Conferences and Symposia The research programs of individual faculty members are aimed at 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 for journals such as:
- Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area
- Himalayan Linguistics
- Journal of South Asian Language and Linguistics
- International Journal of American Linguistics Students can participate in student-led reading groups of articles and discussions of research projects in linguistics related to thesis topics.
