Are there still no B&M schools offering a Ed.D. or Ph.D. in TESOL?

Hi all,

I would love to get a Ph.D. in linguistics or applied linguistics online (I know there are a few international options), but realistically this is probably not a terribly attractive degree to offer, so I am not going to hold my breath. My next best option would be an Ed.D. in TESOL/TESL/ESL/ESOL/whatever, but there don't seem to be any degrees either. Am I missing something? I understand that the M.A./M.Ed is the terminal degree in the discipline (as it allows graduates to teach at universities and community colleges), but surely ELT is a large enough field for someone to have come up with a doctoral degree by distance?!

Is anyone aware of any good doctoral programs in the field? I am only interested in programs offered by traditional B&M schools.

 

You usually don't find the same variety of "majors" for doctorates. It is not surprising you are not finding a program that specifically advertised as a doctorate in TESOL. What will you find are PhDs/EdDs in education, curriculum and teaching, instruction technology, etc. With any of those, you could concentrate on TESOL.

I've known many TESOL instructors to go on and do their doctorates from Online Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.) Programs | Florida, Online, Wherever | Fischler School .

 

Yeah, you're probably right. The problem is that those kinds of degrees won't have any linguistics components, which would be really important to me. I am

 

I have not vetted it but I just came across a TESOL PhD in my own searching. Anaheim University in California has one listed on a search crawler.
Anaheim University - Doctor of Education in TESOL (Ed.D) - 259312 | GradSchools.com

 

I remember this institution from the late 90s when I lived in Japan. They used to heavily advertise their online TESL programs to teachers in Japan, and still do. At the time, I think it was run out of someones apartment, but now it seems to have grown and has NA accreditation. They had a "big gun" in the TESL field that got their program going, David Nunan, but I don't think he teaches anymore. You would probably want to check some TESL blogs for students who have been though this program. Personally, I would not recommend an NA university for a PhD program, but that's just me.

 

Thanks! I wasn't aware Anaheim University wasn't regionally accredited - interesting. Right now it looks like I would have to look UK schools for PhD-level linguistics program. The University of Birmingham has one that looks really good. However, personally I have decided that any sort of distance Ph.D. in Linguistics/Applied Linguistics/TESOL would not be the right choice for me. I already have an M.A. in TESOL, so I can teach college-level ESL/EFL. If I were to get a Ph.D., it would be to be a professor. I know a bunch of current and former linguistics Ph.D. students, and they teach, they publish, and they spend hours on campus every day. A distance program could just not offer that.