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English as a Second Language Master's
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Program type:
Major
Format:
On Campus
Est. time to complete:
2 years
Credit Hours:
36
Focus your skills as an educator and utilize researched-backed methods for acquiring
languages to teach English to non-native speakers.
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 course work from the College of Education). Our MA programs also serve as an excellent
foundation for doctoral studies in second language acquisition and the teaching of
English as a second language.
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Request More InfoWhy Earn an English as a Second Language Master's?
Our Master of Arts degrees in Linguistics and English as a Second Language offer broad training in all core areas of the discipline and prepare you for challenging careers in a variety of industries, including:
- Bioinformatics
- Education
- Government
- Law
- Natural language processing
UNT Linguistics is supported by an active linguistics research community at UNT with ties across campus and with local, national, and international communities. 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
- Student Linguistics Association at North Texas (SLANT)
The M.A. 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
English as a Second Language Master's 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.
Our program offers courses on second language acquisition; pedagogical approaches
to English grammar; methods and practicum in teaching English as a second or additional
language; and English language variation and change, including varieties of English
spoken worldwide.
What Can You Do With an English as a Second Language Master's?
CNN lists linguistics as the second most overlooked job possibility for new graduates. 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
Because linguistics provides students with the skills to analyze language, companies such as Microsoft, Google and Apple also are eager to hire students with linguistics degrees.
English as a Second Language Master's Courses You Could Take
Research Design in Linguistics (3 hrs)
Provides an introduction to research methods in linguistics and applied linguistics/ESL
with a focus on empirical research and the social and behavioral aspect of language
science. Covers a range of techniques for conducting linguistic research including
language data elicitation, data compilation, and data mining.
Sociolinguistics (3 hrs)
Study of the relationship of language and society as shown in the following areas:
the ethnography of speaking (analysis of discourse), language variation and social
class, pidgin and Creole languages, diglossia and multilingualism, ethnic varieties,
language and sex, language policy and planning.
Corpus Linguistics (3 hrs)
Introduces computerized research methods, which are applied to large databases of
language used in natural communicative settings to supplement more traditional ways
of linguistic analysis in all linguistic sub-disciplines.
Phonology I (3 hrs)
Introduction to phonological theory and analysis based on cross-linguistic evidence.
Topics: phonological representations including features, syllables and metrical structure;
phonological processes; phonological typology and universals.
Teaching English as a Second Language (3 hrs)
Current pedagogical theory affecting the teaching of English as a second language.
Both theoretical and applied approaches are considered.
Second Language Acquisition (3 hrs)
Covers a broad range of issues concerning the acquisition of second languages. Topics
include L1-L2 differences, child-adult L2 differences, the teachability of grammar
and models of L2 acquisition.
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