Dr. J's Blog of ELT Praxis

I have been tracking full-time TESOL jobs since Fall 2009, my first year as a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa. Back then, the job market was quite bad because of the 2008 economic crisis. My motivation for tracking jobs was to help my future TESOL students understand the market. This was based on colleagues asking about good locations to live and work. I had hunches but not enough data, and now I have almost a decade of data. What did I track?  In Fall 2009, I started tracking TESOL job announcements from HigherEdJobs.com and the TESOL Career Center for tenure and non-tenure professorships in universities and community colleges. In 2010, I expanded my tracking to include instructor positions at universities (mainly intensive English programs) and "other" jobs, which used to be mainly governmental, non-profit, and publishing jobs. But now they are predominantly in the for-profit higher education ELT industry, including corporations like Shorelight and INTO. In 201...

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...

Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Afghan_man_reading_Wikipedia_article_in_Kandahar.jpg The short answer via statistical analysis is yes .  For more information, read  Lucassen, T., Dijkstra, R., & Schraagen, J. M. (2012). Readability of Wikipedia.  First Monday at   http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3916/3297 .  Wikipedians are aware that the open online encyclopedia may be too difficult, and there is a discussion of its reading level at  https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reading_level . Much of this discussion took place over a decade ago, but the gist is that many contributors write at or for the college level. What appeals to me most is at the end of the page, where Wikipedians are discussing accessibility and what it means to be open to all. Here's my screenshot (in case it gets edited later). What does this mean for English language teachers? I was interested in seeing how selected Wikipedi...

There's a somewhat famous expression that most teachers find insulting - " He who can does. He who cannot teaches." It implies that teachers cannot function or "produce results" in the "real world" but they know enough to tell or direct others how. And this implies that education is mainly about skill building (for jobs) and not about knowledge or character. I could go on and on about this, but I wanted to discuss HL Mencken's addition to George Bernard Shaw's quote: Those who can't teach - administrate.  Those who can't administrate - go into politics. I heard this quote way back in late elementary school or junior high school and it struck a chord. It especially rings loudly in my mind as I have spent the last few years of my life in administration rather than teaching in higher education. And sadly I have to confirm that many administrators can't or won't teach. Yes, it makes me sad because I am an educator and I bel...

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...

One of the more influential TESOL Quarterly articles I have read over the past decade was Karen E. Johnson's "The Sociocultural Turn and Its Challenges for Second Language Teacher Education." It helped guide me during the early stages of my doctoral dissertation. I'm revisiting now because it relates to my current position, and I wanted to see if Dr. Johnson's concerns are still valid ten years later. Theory/Practice Versus Praxis From my perspective, the theory-practice dichotomy is still quite prevalent in teacher education. I have entered discussions with our faculty on what should stand at the core of our ESL curriculum, which I perceive as research in applied linguistics or informal research in teaching and learning. I see this more as a applied linguistics-education dichotomy as research is on both ends, but education is more steeped in practice. Johnson recommends praxis as a solution to this dichotomy because it "is more suitable for the prepara...

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...