LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT
SELF-STUDY GUIDE
FOR VISITING COMMITTEE
1999-2004
VISITING COMMITTEE
MARCH 8, 2004
Prepared by Eileen Fitzpatrick and Alice F. Freed
PREFACE 3
A. PROGRAM OBJECTIVES 6
B. PROGRAM 7
1. Curriculum 7
Curriculum Content. 7
Curriculum Commentary 12
2. Advising 13
3. Co-curricular Activities 14
Activities with linguists outside of Montclair State 15
Grants and research 17
Information Exchange 19
4. Special Student Opportunities 19
Graduate Honor Society 19
Graduate Assistantships 19
Internships/Externships 20
Student Publications and Presentations 21
Graduate Student Mini-conference 21
Clubs and Student Support 21
C. Outcomes: Programs and Student Learning 22
1. Testing, Evaluation, and Assessments 22
2. Retention 23
Undergraduate Majors 23
Graduate Programs 23
MA in Applied Linguistics 23
Post B.A. TESL 24
TESOL 24
3. Activities of Graduates 24
D. Faculty 26
E. Facilities 27
F. LIBRARY AND TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES 28
G. SUPPORT SERVICES 29
H. RELATED DEPARTMENTS 29
I. ACCREDITATION 29
J. LONG RANGE PLANS 29
K. ENROLLMENT 32
Appendix I: LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COURSE-ROTATION 35
Appendix II: Retention and Enrollment Figures 36
Appendix III: MA's Conferred 37
PREFACE
Since 1998, when Linguistics last had a Visiting Committee Evaluation, Montclair State has developed a new Strategic Plan that envisions a rather different university by 2008, the university's centenary. Because of the importance of the new Strategic Plan for future development at Montclair State, the synergies between the Plan and the Linguistic Department's activities are discussed here as a background to this self-study report.
The new Plan calls for an increase in student capacity for the university from 13,000 students overall to 13,500 undergraduates and 4,500 post-baccalaureate students. This is intended to stem the out-migration of students from New Jersey to other states. The plan’s goal is for instruction to be carried out predominantly by full-time faculty in relatively small classroom settings; this has resulted in a higher rate of faculty hiring since 1998, with the need for new faculty lines being determined by the strength of student enrollments in individual departments.
In the new Strategic Plan, explicit reference is made to linguistics with regard to language acquisition and to cross-cultural studies. In addition, in several very specific ways, the university's goals speak to the current make-up and future plans of the Linguistics Department.
The Linguistics Department at Montclair, while relatively small, has a complex set of programs and offerings. These include BA and MA degree programs in linguistics, a minor in linguistics, a minor in cognitive science, a track within the Master of Arts in Teaching, three types of teaching certificates, courses in English as a Second Language (ESL), and courses in four non-Indo-European languages. All of these programs are either operating at capacity or are programs that the Strategic Plan regards as “areas that provide exceptional opportunities for growth over the next several years because of their alignment with the needs and interests of the region we serve or the potential for external funding.” These areas, as listed in the Strategic Plan, include:
· Language proficiency and new approaches to language acquisition.
This area encompasses the expertise of half of the Linguistics Department’s faculty, as well as our ESL and non-Indo-European language programs. The emphasis of the Plan on small classroom settings will go a long way towards fostering the second language proficiency required by many of the professions that Montclair students enter.
· Cross-cultural understanding fostered through global area studies and the experience of diversity in the classroom and beyond.
Several of the linguistic department’s courses, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, concentrate on the relationships among language, culture, and society. These courses study the role that language plays in shaping diverse belief systems and various world views; an understanding of the interplay of language and culture leads students to greater cross-cultural understanding. Interestingly, many of the students at Montclair who are attracted to Linguistics are students whose home language is a language other than English; we also attract many international students. This mix of students in the classroom provides a case-study in diversity; it is quite common to have five or more different language groups represented in a single linguistics class. Finally, the department’s non-Indo-European language program offers courses in Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese, languages that could be included in the formation of new interdisciplinary programs in Middle Eastern and Asian area studies.
· Teacher education.
The Linguistics Department offers first and second field certification programs in ESL and provides instruction for the TESL track of the Master of Arts in Teaching degree programs; it also offers service courses for English Education majors.
· Scholarship and research that actively engages students.
Many courses offered by the Linguistics Department require students to engage in original scholarly research. In addition, in the past five years, the department has provided paid research opportunities for 31 students. Details are provided in section B4 of this self-study document.
· Consortial arrangements that extend research opportunities to students and faculty.
Several of the student research opportunities in the department over the past five years have been sponsored by local industries including Lucent Bell Labs, LinguisTech, Random House, and MSB/Vox.
The Strategic Plan also outlines goals that include:
· Development of programs that cross disciplines.
Linguistics, as a field, is interdisciplinary. The subfields of linguistics represented by the department’s course offerings include anthropological linguistics, computational linguistics, language learning and teacher education, language planning and policy, literacy, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Linguistics has taken advantage of this interdisciplinarity in developing the computational track within the MA in Applied Linguistics and in the establishment of the Cognitive Science minor, which unites the departments of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology in the study of higher level cognitive processes.
· Strategic use of technology in teaching.
Several areas in Linguistics are well-suited to human-computer interaction and the department has capitalized on this: ESL students carry out tasks with teachers-in-training over WebCams; phonetics students record and analyze their own voices, and several courses use the computer-based techniques of corpus linguistics. Several faculty members have made their courses entirely available through BlackBoard; others provide course readings through the university library’s Electronic Reserves service rather than with traditional course reading packets. Finally, the department is sponsoring the Fifth Symposium of the American Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics in May. The focus of this group is applications-oriented analysis of online corpora, with language instruction as the primary application.
· Effective ESL testing, instruction, and support for non-native speakers, a goal that is aimed at student retention.
The department continues to track language minority students as a follow-up to the ELMS (English Language Minority Support) grant that it received from the State of New Jersey in 2000. The grant work identified factors that foster academic success in non-native speakers of English.
· Support for international exchanges and partnerships.
The department has granted three MA degrees to students from Universidad Del Valle De Atemajac (UNIVA) in Guadalajara, Mexico under an exchange agreement negotiated in 1996. A fourth UNIVA student is currently enrolled in the Montclair MA program and for the first time, a student from Montclair is studying at UNIVA. The department has also had several exchanges with Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia, most recently a reciprocal Fulbright exchange. In addition, the department has hosted several visiting scholars from China, Jordan, and Ukraine.
· Developing the university as a resource for local businesses, government agencies and school districts.
The applied orientation of the linguistics department gives graduating students skills that are readily employable. The teacher education majors are regularly hired by local school districts; other students now have or have recently completed intern/externships for the Army Research Lab, AT&T Labs, the Educational Testing Service, the LinguisTech Consortium, Lucent Bell Labs, the Proteus Project at New York University, Random House Publishing and MSB/Vox. In addition, linguistics students provide teaching assistance to the local school districts in which they are placed as student teachers.
· Expanding opportunities for school and community based learning.
The intern/externships that linguistics has been able to offer its students give ample opportunity for community-based learning, as well as enabling students to bridge the gap between the classroom and the workplace.
Finally, the Strategic Plan outlines a change in the university’s mission: “The University, which is currently classified by the Carnegie Foundation as a Master's College and University I, intends to meet the Carnegie Foundation criteria for classification as a Doctoral/Research University-Intensive institution.”[1] Changing a university’s mission is a politically difficult effort, particularly for a public university, as it affects the academic standing and financial support of all the other institutions of higher education in the state. Prior to the development of the current Strategic Plan, and before the university sought to formally change its mission at the state level, the Linguistics Department, (along with a few other departments), was invited to develop a proposal for a Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics. The department was approached because of its successful MA degree program and because Linguistics was recognized as being a field that allowed for cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, and technologically-oriented studies. A full curriculum and proposal for a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics was developed and was approved by Montclair State University’s Board of Trustees in 1996, but the program failed to win approval by the State Council of University Presidents ostensibly due to the nature of Montclair’s mission.
The current structure of the Master’s level offerings in the Linguistics Department is the result of modifications made to the program in 1997, changes made so that students could continue on into the Ph.D. program. In conjunction with core courses in linguistics, it offers concentrations in several applied subfields, including second language teaching, language and society, and computational linguistics. Because of this applied emphasis, the MA in Linguistics is in conformance with the Strategic Plan’s view of doctoral level programs that have “an applied or professional focus,” a goal which the linguistics department applauds, as it has allowed students to be placed professionally in each of the subfields represented by the department’s course offerings. While the department fine-tunes its offerings at the Master’s level, the faculty look forward to the time when the University will be allowed to grant a degree of Doctor of Philosophy, currently not a degree considered available for Montclair State University, but one which local industries advise is necessary for successful job placement for graduating students.
It is against the backdrop of the significant changes in the goals and mission of the university that the following report is submitted.
A. PROGRAM OBJECTIVES
The primary mission of the Linguistics Department is to provide both undergraduate and graduate students at Montclair State University with a high quality education in Linguistics. As one of only two Linguistics Departments in the New Jersey State University system,[2] the department feels a particular responsibility to maintain, and where possible, to raise existing standards for Linguistics education.
This goal is furthered by teaching students how to gather and analyze linguistic data pertaining to the formal aspects of human language (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics) and related to the use of language in specific social and cultural contexts. The goal is also advanced by conducting research on various aspects of language and language use, and by including students in this research. The Linguistics Department at Montclair is unique in the region in teaching students how to apply this knowledge in various subfields. It provides an optional professional track that combines the Linguistics major with Teacher Education, leading to state certification in Teaching English as a Second Language as a first or second teaching field. In addition, it offers internship and externship opportunities that develop students' analytical skills while on the job.
The department sees as its secondary objective the need to increase the general level of awareness about language and linguistics in the academic community. Thus the department seeks to act as a resource to the university and the community at large on questions of language, language use, and language education.
The department also serves the needs of undergraduate students who seek instruction in several languages by offering courses in American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, English as a second language (ESL) and Japanese. The Linguistics Department was instrumental in forming the interdisciplinary cognitive science minor approved in 1999. At the graduate level, the department continues to offer a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics, second field certification in teaching English as a second language (TESL), and a new graduate Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) available to both American and international students.
B. PROGRAM
1. Curriculum
Curriculum Content.
The Linguistics Department houses programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The department’s curriculum consists of seven different, though overlapping programs:
· Major and minor programs leading to the Bachelor of Arts degree
· Teacher education within the Linguistics major. This program, combined with the appropriate sequence of professional courses, provides the necessary courses for students who are seeking New Jersey State certification in TESL as a first teaching field. The TESL program as a first teaching field is also available to graduate students enrolled in the Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) degree offered by the College of Education and Human Services. Linguistics courses form an integral part of the requirements for these students.
· A post-B.A. TESL program that leads to certification in TESL as a second teaching field; this program is designed for students who already have a first teaching certificate in another academic discipline.
· A Master of Arts degree in Applied Linguistics.
· A TESOL certificate that provides training in teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages for both American and international students.
· A service component that provides instruction in academic English for students of English as a second language.
· A service component that provides Montclair State undergraduates with courses that satisfy requirements in other academic programs and/or satisfy parts of the University-wide General Education (GenEd) Requirements in the Social Sciences and World Languages. Included in the latter category are the non-Indo-European language courses taught at Montclair: American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, and Japanese.
a. The Major in Linguistics has two tracks: (1) a liberal arts track and (2) a teacher education track for students seeking certification in Teaching English as a Second Language as a first teaching field. All students majoring in Linguistics must take the same set of required courses. These courses are intended to introduce students to the main areas of linguistic study. The liberal arts major and the teacher education major select from a slightly different set of electives. The liberal arts major program has no professional orientation whereas the TESL major program includes the requirements of the Teacher Education course sequence within the College of Education and Human Services. This program prepares teachers of English as a Second Language (K-12) by providing them with a strong foundation in Linguistics, in cross-cultural studies, and in TESL methodology. This program, like all teacher certification programs, conforms closely to state guidelines. The requirements of the Montclair State TESL program exceed the minimum requirements of the State of New Jersey.