Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

Since I began my doctoral studies in the fall semester of 2009, I have been keeping track of the job market for English language teachers.  More more details on how I kept track, I recommend you visit my the Job Market Archive page in the tab above.  For this particular blog post, I'd like to focus exclusively on the English language teaching job market in American colleges and universities.  This only includes full-time positions and not adjunct or part-time positions, which would most likely more than triple the number of openings. Show Me The Jobs! You can access the list of past job openings here - http://bit.ly/1myCABe The Time for Job Opening Announcements Figure 1 - Number of job announcements per month, 2010-2015 Patterns by Month and Season You can clearly see that July is the hottest month for employers to announce job openings during the year followed by a second peak in October.  These postings are usually, but not always, for positions th...

Dissertations & Theses Dissertations and theses are not always the best studies, but they provide more depth into an area of inquiry than most research articles mainly because there are fewer or no restrictions on the length of the writing.  If you're not familiar with PhD dissertations, many are over 100 pages long and it's not uncommon to find ones that are over 200 pages long.  Master's theses are typically shorter than dissertations, but the research methodology is usually not as rigorous. When I was searching for literature on intensive English programs, a good proportion of the studies were dissertations and theses.  Although they are more time-consuming to read, I find that literature review in dissertations are very helpful with learning more about the current research.  I'd like to briefly review the findings of these dissertations and theses regardless of the quality of their methodology (for MA theses) for the purpose of understanding trends. To...

What are OERs? What's the problem? I am an advocate for Open Educational Resources (OERs), but the problem is that they are scattered all over the internet.  There are some websites or institutions that attempt to organize them, but many of these have difficulty keeping up or organizing them or making them user-friendly for teachers and students.  Even a simple web search for OERs for English language learners will show that teachers will have to wade through a large number of websites and websites within websites to find a nice clearinghouse of OERs.  For example, I found an open Google group chat that provided an excellent but daunting list at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-hvzoF-kWWZLacSiiRBYf9etmMtcUPsDQsPxarTZV3U/edit?usp=sharing This illustrates the main problem with OERs in general.  It appears to me that it is up to the teachers or the department to organize the OERs for their purpose.  Looking at that one resource alone will take...