English as a Second Language Master's

Program type:

Major

Format:

On Campus

Est. time to complete:

2 years

Credit Hours:

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 MS 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 MS 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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Why Earn an English as a Second Language Master's?

Our Master of Science 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.S. 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Current pedagogical theory affecting the teaching of English as a second language. Both theoretical and applied approaches are considered.

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.