Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

I haven't been blogging over the past month because I started a new teaching job at a community college. This job is a refreshing change for me because I haven't been focusing on improving student writing in my career for a while. In my previous position, I was leading the curriculum committee at an intensive English program in an effort to update its curriculum. We thoroughly analyzed the reading curriculum and were nearly done analyzing the listening and speaking curriculum before the department made drastic personnel cuts, which included me. If none of these cuts were made, the committee would be focusing on the writing curriculum right now. Instead, I am teaching two rhetoric and composition courses to first-year community college students. None of them are international students or English language learners, so that's a big change. Is my ELT training relevant to first-year college students? The quick answer is somewhat because the ESL and EFL students I have wo...

Depending where you are and where you want to be, 2016 was a good, bad, or typical year for ELT programs in the United States.  Bad year for university jobs, teaching and administrative Good year for community college jobs Typical year (trending positively) for professor jobs Typical year (unpredictable) for other jobs If you want to learn more, read on. I describe each job sector through my interpretation of ELT job opening announcement data from the TESOL Career Center, Higher Ed Jobs.com, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. University Jobs I work at an intensive English program at a public university in the United States, and it's quite noticeable that the ELT job market has taken quite a hit this year with the Saudi government cutting scholarships . I saw this firsthand as the Saudi enrollment numbers at my university dropped, but this is only a few years where most programs saw record numbers of Saudi students . My data confirms this trend.   Since 200...

Recap about University Jobs I am continuing my series of blog posts covering the English language teaching job market in the United States with this post on community college jobs.  Last week, I discussed the job market for teaching English in American universities and colleges.  Since a month has past, it seems that the downward trend in job announcements is continuing.  This past January had the lowest number of job announcements for university jobs since 2012.  Of the many contributing factors, I believe the strongest one is the strong US dollar, which makes traveling to and living in the United States more expensive for international students. Community College Jobs Generally, community college ELT jobs are not announced as frequently as university ELT jobs.  Since October 2009, there have been 287 job announcements from community colleges compared to 795 from universities.  Just because there are more university ELT job announcements does not mea...

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...

My experiences teaching English abroad plus my research investigating the culture learning of sojourning English language teacher have helped me gain a deeper understanding of intercultural communication.  During the past year and a half, I have been developing my skills to become an intercultural communication trainer as an instructional designer at Kirkwood Community College.  Although I have achieved a lot with Kirkwood's Culturally Responsive Classroom course, I was still uncertain if my intercultural communication training skills could be applied elsewhere.  I found a good opportunity to interact with other intercultural communication trainers was to attend the 2014 SIETAR-USA Conference in Portland last month.  I learned about SIETAR through my literature review for developing the Culturally Responsive Classroom, which is what I and a colleague presented on at the conference.  Below is our presentation, which represents a portion of what we shared with ou...