The TESOL M.A is DEAD!
Updated: Sep 4, 2022
You're looking to continue your career and you may think your next step is the TESOL M.A. But here's what universities and other TEFL certification programs won't tell you about it.
The first problem with it is that it is NOT a teaching certification. The best option for a TESOL M.A. with no teaching certification is to become an adjunct professor. Adjunct professors are not professors in the sense of researchers with Ph.D.'s that teach courses in Universities. Aside from being very limited, adjunct jobs pay significantly lower. A certified teacher with a TESOL M.A, will make more money in the long run and have more job opportunities than an uncertified teacher with a TESOL M.A.
The second major problem with the TESOL M.A is that it doesn't teach you the skills to know how to teach. I was very disappointed when I began my TESOL M.A course and realized this. I began to desperately look for alternative
M.A's for language teachers, believing that I may have to resign myself to getting the degree, to appear legitimate, despite not feeling that the program was in touch with the reality of the language teaching field. There was some useful background knowledge that I was able to obtain, and best practices for lesson planning to keep in mind, overall, having worked in the language teaching field for several years, it was obvious to me that the questions that I had after working in the real world and observing the problems in the field, would not be answered there.
Universities have just recently, caught up with the true skill-sets needed and knowledge necessary to be a successful English as a second teacher due to the work that language teachers, language students, and content creators like me have done to raise awareness of the issues we are facing in the field. For the first time, it seems that some linguistic programs in the US
A have begun to recognize that language teachers need a background in linguistics, and not only linguistics but sociolinguistics, and have been incorporating these components into their applied linguistics curricula, which traditionally did not have a path that was just right for language teachers, marking the soon to be the death of the TESOL M.A. I am glad to say, I was happily able to change my master's to applied linguistics, and found the perfect degree course for the work that I do.