With this partially online master's degree program, develop the teaching skills and professional expertise needed to advance your career in English language education without leaving your current job.

At a Glance

For programs beginning in 2021

Credits

34

Format

Part-Time Hybrid

Priority deadline

January 31, rolling thereafter

I-20 Deadline for Student Visas

March 1

Duration

2 Years

Residencies

United States

Critical Global Issue of Study

Education & Social Change

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Please note that SIT will make every effort to maintain its programs as described. To respond to emergent situations, like COVID-19, however, SIT may have to change or cancel programs.

WHY A HYBRID MASTER'S IN TESOL?

Drawing on more than 50 years of visionary experiential learning, this award-winning in-person and online master’s degree is recognized by the US State Department as one of the top TESOL programs in the nation. Through brief yet intensive summer residencies and immersive online coursework, attain professional expertise teaching English to speakers of other languages to rapidly advance your career and change the landscape of language education.

Your program will begin with an online class that is designed to help you build your learning community, think deeply about teaching and learning, deepen active listening skills, and develop goals for your learning in the context of majors shifts in the field, including multimodal literacies, translanguaging, and plurilingualism.

Over the summer, you will travel to SIT’s beautiful Vermont campus for a three-week residency, meet your faculty advisors, continue coursework, and network with other students, and further develop a learning community with peers who work as teachers around the world.

For the remainder of the summer and into the following spring, you will continue in your experiential online studies in close collaboration with your cohort, completing 10 to 15 hours of coursework a week.

Throughout your studies you will apply what you have learned directly to your teaching context. During this time, your SIT faculty mentor will make an in-person visit to your place of work to observe your teaching and engage you in a process of reflection on and learning from your practice.

During your second summer, you will return to SIT’s campus for more coursework, to reconvene with your cohort, and co-organize a language-learning conference.

During the second year you will pursue a specialization of your choice—teacher training, plurilingual pedagogy,or  teaching refugees and displaced persons—and you will complete an independent professional project.

Since its inception in 1969, the SIT master’s program in TESOL has prepared countless graduates for highly successful careers across the globe, teaching English to people of all backgrounds at every age level and producing dozens of fellows sent by the US State Department to embassies abroad.

Career Paths

Students who have graduated with this degree have worked in careers such as:

  • U.S. Department of State English Language Fellow

  • English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher

  • Applied linguist

  • Teacher trainer

  • English, ESL, linguistics curriculum developer

  • University faculty, teacher education program

  • U.S. Department of State English language officer

  • Education consultant

  • Textbook writer, editor or publisher

  • Language school founder and developer

Visit the SIT blog to read more about SIT Graduate Institute alumni careers.

Program Sites

Part-Time Hybrid Format

  • Courses take place primarily online.
  • Summer residency typically takes place on SIT’s Vermont campus but may also occur online, virtually (three weeks).

Brattleboro, Vermont

Vermont is at the forefront of sustainability, education, and regeneration. New England is a haven for start-ups, transition towns, community-owned forests, artisanal food and beverage companies, sustainable farming, eco-architecture, green energy, and many environmental and social justice organizations. SIT’s beautiful southern Vermont campus offers woodland trails, hiking, running, and cycling, as well as a private library, study rooms with mountain views, and an entertainment space where students often gather at the end of the day to socialize. You will be a few miles from downtown Brattleboro, which offers an array of shops, restaurants, and eateries. 

Please note that in order to take advantage of dynamic learning opportunities, program excursions may occasionally vary.

Academics

Program Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the program, students will be able to:

Our student learning outcomes describe the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and awareness that we find essential to developing and internalizing a habit of lifelong learning. A teacher who completes the MA in TESOL program must demonstrate an integration of and growth in six dimensions of a teaching self as described below. These six dimensions relate to their own learning and to their teaching practice and represent the six student learning outcomes for the program:

  • The disciplined self develops an understanding of trends and the evolution of one’s field, as well as of modes of rigorous inquiry into learning, teaching, and oneself as a situated cultural being.
  • The synthesizing self draws on ideas and findings from various disciplines and sources and from both emic and etic data.
  • The creating self problematizes one’s conceptualization of language, culture, learning, and teaching; conjures up new ways of thinking; poses unfamiliar questions; and puts forward original ideas to be put to the test of practice.
  • The plurilingual and pluricultural self navigates between cultures, languages, and registers; draws on all the semiotic elements in its communicative repertoire; and engages with others across cultural differences.
  • The respectful, collaborative, inquiring self welcomes difference and diversity and inquires into and shows empathy and respect for others and their communities.
  • The ethical self promotes equity, social justice, and inclusivity and advocates for and practices this type of worldview in their personal and professional life.

(Five of the “six selves” headings draw on Gardner, H. (2006). Five Minds for the Future. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.)


Read more about Program Learning Outcomes.



Coursework

With SIT’s experiential learning, you will learn how to put theory into practice and theorize your practice. In addition to core courses, you will have the opportunity to choose a specialization, allowing you to build key skills that will help you meet your career goals. Our part-time, hybrid format allows you to complete most of your coursework for the master’s in TESOL online so you can stay in your job and apply your learning in your community.

In this program you will further develop an approach to teaching informed by self-reflection on your own past and present learning and teaching experiences and a growing understanding of and experimentation with:

  • The multitudes of factors (affective, cognitive, social, and others) that shape one’s language learning trajectory
  • The intercultural and identity dimensions of language and cultural learning
  • Multilingualism, linguistic and cultural diversity, and plurilingual pedagogies
  • Language as a complex, dynamic, regularly patterned, meaning-making system
  • The theory underlying the teaching of the “four skills”—reading, writing, listening, and speaking—and how to design course lessons that develop and integrate learning in these skills
  • The tools, principles and practices of a variety of approaches to teaching languages and developing curriculum

Please expand the sections below to see detailed course information.


This is SIT

  • We value active togetherness, reciprocity, and respect as the essential ingredients for building a sustainable community.
  • With open minds, empathy, and courage, we facilitate intercultural understanding and respect for the commonalities and differences between people.
  • We champion social inclusion & justice in all that we are and all that we do, from ensuring our community and our programs amplify the voices, agency, and dignity of all people to deliberately instilling the principles and practices of inclusion in all of our work.
  • We are committed to human and environmental well-being through sustainability and contributing to a better world for all living and future generations.

SEMESTER DETAILS

This two–year, 34–credit program combines online and limited residential coursework and reflective practice within your ongoing professional activities and concludes with a final Independent Professional Project. In the first year of the program, students will focus on understanding teaching and learning and developing a learning community and lifelong reflective practice. In the second year, students will focus on a specialization (plurilingual pedagogy, teaching refugees and displaced persons, or teacher training and education). This work is done in small seminars with faculty mentors and is designed to help students become part of a network in the field and develop a deeper understanding of how classroom learning connects with the students communities they serve and their own role as advocates. The seminars also provide a foundation for the final element of the program, the MA thesis. Coursework is listed below.

Phase One courses (26 Credits):

  • Foundations (1 credit, online) 
  • Developing an Approach to Teaching Languages (3 credits, online and face to face) 
  • Teaching the Four Skills (3 credits, online) 
  • Intercultural Communication and Ethnographic Inquiry for Language Educators (3 credits, online and face to face) 
  • English Applied Linguistics (4 credits, online and face to face) 
  • Second Language Acquisition (3 credits, online and face to face) 
  • Curriculum Design and Assessment (2 credits, online) 
  • Interim-Year Teaching Practicum (6 credits over two semesters, online and face to face) 
  • Sandanona Conference (1 credit, face to face) 

Phase Two courses (8 Credits):

Specialization Advanced Seminar (3 credits, online)

During your second year of the program you will choose an area of specialization for further in-depth examination and investigation in a faculty mentored process.

Choose from one of the following: 

  • Plurilingual Pedagogy – Explore ways in which we can facilitate and expedite learning by tapping into the full communicative repertoires of the learners, disrupting language hierarchization, monolingual ideology, and the devalorization of people and cultures.
  • Teacher Training and Teacher Development – Focus on teacher education and training in multicultural and multilingual contexts surfacing and addressing different issues between teacher training and teacher development in culturally and linguistically complex contexts.
  • Teaching Refugees and Displaced Persons – Analyze organizations and programs designed to meet the learning needs of students at different stages of displacement, resettlement, and repatriation. Determine how we can better meet the needs of  refugee and displaced students by drawing on the rich backgrounds, personal agency, and learning resources that students bring.

Independent Professional Project (5 credits, online) 

The Independent Professional Project, or thesis, is the final component of this program. The project is meant to be both a significant personal achievement as well as a body of publishable research of value to others in the professional community. 

Projects may take a variety of formats, allowing you to focus on a topic that will benefit you in your development as a language teacher: 

  • An academic research paper 
  • A classroom-based action research project 
  • A materials development project 

Review past Independent Professional Projects completed by students in our MA in TESOL programs. 

Professional Practicum

A cornerstone of SIT’s Master of Arts in TESOL is the teaching practicum, which you undertake in your place of work. This lets you apply learning from the classroom directly to real-world settings while getting hands-on, professional experience you can put to immediate use when you graduate. 

During the year following your first residency, you will work closely with a faculty mentor to develop your skills and reflect on your new knowledge and awareness in your own classroom. You and your mentor will communicate regularly through phone calls, email, and reports to evaluate your teaching competencies, assess strengths and weaknesses, and determine areas for improvement and growth. 

Your mentor will visit your classroom—wherever it is in the world—to observe your teaching and provide feedback and support to enhance and enrich your impact in the classroom. 

To get the most out of this practicum, your teaching load during the semester of your practicum visit should include at least 100 hours of teaching. You should be the primary teacher and the minimum class size should be five students. If these requirements cannot be met, you may speak with the program’s chair to see if other arrangements can be made. Such arrangements must be approved in advance by the chair. 

During the practicum phase, you’ll remain engaged with faculty and other students and receive course credit for documenting the integration of your knowledge and skills while working in a professional context. 

Faculty & Staff

TESOL (Part-Time Hybrid)

Leslie Turpin, PhD
Program Chair, MA in TESOL
Marti Anderson, PhD
Faculty, MA in TESOL
Sean Conley, EdD
Affiliated Faculty, MA in TESOL
Steven Iams, PhD
Assistant Professor, MA in TESOL
Elizabeth Tannenbaum, MAT
Professor Emerita, MA in TESOL

Discover the Possibilities