LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT
SELF-STUDY GUIDE
FOR VISITING COMMITTEE
1999-2004
VISITING COMMITTEE
MARCH 8, 2004
Prepared by Eileen Fitzpatrick and Alice F. Freed
PREFACE ....................................................................................................................... 2
A. PROGRAM OBJECTIVES ........................................................................................ 5
B. PROGRAM ................................................................................................................ 6
1. CURRICULUM ........................................................................................................................................ 6
Curriculum Content. .............................................................................................................................. 6
Curriculum Commentary ..................................................................................................................... 11
2. ADVISING ............................................................................................................................................ 12
3. CO-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES .............................................................................................................. 13
Activities with linguists outside of Montclair State ............................................................................. 14
Grants and research ............................................................................................................................ 16
Information Exchange ......................................................................................................................... 18
4. SPECIAL STUDENT OPPORTUNITIES .................................................................................................... 18
Graduate Honor Society ...................................................................................................................... 18
Graduate Assistantships ...................................................................................................................... 18
Internships/Externships ....................................................................................................................... 19
Student Publications and Presentations .............................................................................................. 20
Graduate Student Mini-conference...................................................................................................... 20
Clubs and Student Support .................................................................................................................. 20
C. OUTCOMES: PROGRAMS AND STUDENT LEARNING ...................................... 21
1. TESTING, EVALUATION, AND ASSESSMENTS ....................................................................................... 21
2. RETENTION .......................................................................................................................................... 22
Undergraduate Majors ........................................................................................................................ 22
Graduate Programs ............................................................................................................................. 22
MA in Applied Linguistics ................................................................................................................... 22
Post B.A. TESL .................................................................................................................................... 23
TESOL ................................................................................................................................................. 23
3. ACTIVITIES OF GRADUATES ................................................................................................................ 23
D. FACULTY ................................................................................................................ 25
E. FACILITIES ............................................................................................................. 26
F. LIBRARY AND TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES....................................................... 27
G. SUPPORT SERVICES ............................................................................................ 28
H. RELATED DEPARTMENTS ................................................................................... 28
I. ACCREDITATION..................................................................................................... 28
J. LONG RANGE PLANS ............................................................................................ 29
K. ENROLLMENT ........................................................................................................ 31
APPENDIX I: LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COURSE-ROTATION ........................... 34
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
1
APPENDIX II: RETENTION AND ENROLLMENT FIGURES....................................... 35
APPENDIX III: MA'S CONFERRED ............................................................................. 36
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 outmigration 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
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
2
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
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
3
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 technologicallyoriented 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.
1
The Carnegie Foundation defines a Doctoral/ Research University-Intensive as an institution that typically offers a
wide range of baccalaureate programs, and that is committed to graduate education through the doctorate. During a
three-year review period the institution must award at least 10 doctoral degrees per year across three or more
disciplines, or at least 20 doctoral degrees per year overall.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
4
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.
2
The NJ State system includes The College of New Jersey, Kean University, Montclair State, New Jersey City
University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Ramapo College, Richard Stockton College, Rowan, Rutgers,
Thomas Edison State College, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and William Paterson
University.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
5
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.
The curriculum for the major is as follows:
Required Courses:
(24 Semester Hours)
LNGN 210 Introduction to General Linguistics
LNGN 220 Structure of American English
LNGN 230 Language in Society
LNGN 245 Language and Culture
LNGN 300 Syntax
LNGN 301 Semantics
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
6
OR
LNGN 302 Pragmatics
LNGN 330 Phonetics
LNGN 331 Phonology
Electives for the Liberal Arts Major: (12 Semester Hours)
LNGN 240 Languages of the World
LNGN 255 Language and Gender
LNGN 260 Dialectology
LNGN 270 History of Linguistics
LNGN 280 Bilingualism
LNGN 284 History of the English Language
LNGN 301 Semantics
OR
LNGN 302 Pragmatics
LNGN 310 Morphology
LNGN 325 Principles of Second Language Learning
LNGN 370 Comparative and Historical Linguistics
LNGN 410 Linguistics and Philosophy
LNGN 420 Language and the Mind
LNGN 430 Field Methods
LNGN 445 Natural Language Processing
LNGN 450 Selected Topics in Linguistics
LNGN 451 Selected Topics in Linguistics
LNGN 460 Topics in the Structure of a Selected Language
LNGN 478 Independent Study in Linguistics
LNGN 479 Independent Study in Linguistics
PSYC 290/CMPT 290 Introduction to Cognitive Science
PSYC 348 Psycholinguistics
PSYC 490 Seminar in Cognitive Science
Electives for the TESL Major: (12 Semester Hours)
LNGN 260 Dialectology
LNGN 280 Bilingualism
LNGN 284 History of the English Language
LNGN 301 Semantics
OR
LNGN 302 Pragmatics
LNGN 325 Principles of Second Language Learning (recommended)
LNGN 384 Grammars of English
LNGN 420 Language and the Mind
LNGN 450 Selected Topics in Linguistics*
LNGN 478 Independent Study in Linguistics*
LNGN 479 Independent Study in Linguistics*
PSYC 348 Psycholinguistics (recommended)
* Requires approval of the student's advisor
LNGN 403 Methods and Materials of TESL is a required course within the professional sequence
but does not count as a linguistics elective.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
7
In addition to the Linguistics requirements, students seeking certification in TESL as a first
teaching field need to apply to the Center of Pedagogy for admission to the Teacher Education Program,
and must fulfill the requirements that make up the Professional Sequence, including a semester of student
teaching.
b. The Minor in Linguistics is intended for students who have already declared another major but
have a keen interest in Linguistics. Students who seek a minor in Linguistics must take six courses for a
total of eighteen semester hours, including Introduction to General Linguistics and any other five courses
from the list of courses for the major.
c. TESL Certification is also offered as a second teaching certificate on both the undergraduate
and the post-B.A. levels. This program is for students who have (or are seeking) a first teaching certificate
in some other academic discipline. This program prepares students to be teachers of English as a Second
Language (K-12) by providing them with basic preparation in Linguistics and in TESL methodology.
Students who wish to work toward New Jersey State Certification in a second field may qualify for
certification in TESL (as a 2nd Teaching Field) by taking five courses in Linguistics at the undergraduate
or graduate level and completing a supervised TESL Practicum. The required courses for second field
certification are:
Required Courses for TESL Certification (2nd field): (18 semester hours)
LNGN 210 Introduction to General Linguistics
LNGN 220 Structure of American English
LNGN 245 Language and Culture
LNGN 325 Principles of Second Language Learning
LNGN 403 Methods and Materials of TESL
LNGN 405 Field Experience in TESL
Although the certification program in TESL as a 2nd Teaching Field offered by Montclair State
University consists of 18 semester hours, the State of New Jersey requires only 12 hours for TESL
certification. While the Linguistics Department believes that 12 hours are insufficient to prepare ESL
teachers adequately, the department advises students that they might be able to receive TESL certification
after taking only 12 credit hours by applying directly to the state. Montclair State University recommends
students for TESL certification only after they have completed 18 semester hours.
d. The Certificate in TESOL (as distinct from NJ State TESL certification) provides training in
teaching English to speakers of other languages. This certificate was designed for post-BA American and
international students who are interested in teaching ESL in private schools, community colleges, and/or
non-academic settings in the United States and abroad. The certificate is of particular interest to teachers
of English from other countries who are seeking to strengthen their credentials with a TESOL Certificate
from an American university. This certificate was introduced in 2001. Admission to the program is
subject to the Graduate School's entrance requirements, including TOEFL scores where warranted.
The program consists of the following graduate courses:





APLN 500 Language and Linguistics
APLN 520 Current Theories of Second Language Acquisition
APLN 524 Advanced Structure of American English
APLN 525 Methodology of Teaching ESL
APLN 532 Language and Culture
OR
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
8



APLN 534 Languages in Contact
OR
APLN 536 Languages of the USA
APLN 529 TESL Practicum
e. The university’s English as a Second Language (ESL) curriculum, supervised by the
Linguistics Department, consists of both credit and non-credit-bearing courses. The Linguistics
Department is responsible for staffing the courses, setting curriculum guidelines, and determining ESL
policy and scheduling. The Department also represents to the university the needs of students whose first
language is not English. The non-credit ESL courses have been housed in the College of Humanities and
Social Sciences and overseen by the Linguistics Department since July 2003 when the University's Center
for Professional and Continuing Education was closed.
The credit-bearing ESL program provides courses in listening and speaking, in reading, and in
writing. These courses are designed to improve the academic success of non-native speakers of English
who need greater command of particular English skills. These courses are given for students at both the
intermediate and advanced level. Linguistics also offers a course in academic skills for non-native English
speaking graduate students.
The current university English-language policy does not require students to take ESL courses. As
a result, enrollments in the credit-bearing ESL courses have been low. As of Fall 2004, non-native
speakers of English who did not complete four years of high school studies in the United States and/or
who have not successfully completed one year of full-time enrollment in academic courses at a regionally
accredited U.S. college or university will be required to take a two-hour English language placement test
to determine their ESL needs. Students who place into the ESL course sequence will be required to
register for the designated ESL course(s) during their first semester at the university. The Linguistics
Department has agreed to track these students to ensure that they maintain and successfully complete
these ESL requirements.
f. Service Courses are courses offered by the Linguistics Department that contribute to other
academic programs and/or to the University’s General Education Requirement.
1. The courses that serve as electives in other programs are:
Language and Gender (Women's Studies)
Language of the Law (Legal Studies)
Language of Propaganda (Legal Studies)
History of the English Language (English teacher education)
Grammars of English (English teacher education)
Structure of American English (English teacher education)
Syntax (Cognitive Science minor)
Semantics (Cognitive Science minor)
Pragmatics (Cognitive Science minor)
Natural Language Processing (Cognitive Science minor)
Language and Mind (Cognitive Science minor)
As departments revise their curricula, they are increasingly narrowing the range of courses that
can be taken in other departments. As a result, service courses have become a less significant source of
student enrollments for Linguistics than they once were. On the other hand, Linguistics courses are now
serving a greater role within innovative interdisciplinary programs such as the Women's Studies
major/minor and the Cognitive Science minor.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
9
In line with the recommendations of the 1998 Visiting Committee Report, in the past two years,
nine different linguistics and language courses have been submitted and accepted as satisfying various
components of the new General Education Requirement. The new GenEd guidelines went into effect in
the fall of 2002.
2. The courses that serve as electives for General Education (GenEd) are:
In the Social Sciences:
Introduction to General Linguistics
Language and Culture
Language in Society
Language of Propaganda
Language and Gender
In the World Languages (the non-Indo-European languages):
American Sign Language
Arabic
Chinese
Japanese.
Two advanced level ESL courses, Academic Reading and Academic Writing, have been approved by the
College of Humanities and Social Sciences as satisfying the GenEd World Language requirement; these
courses are now before the university-wide GenEd committee.
In addition, two faculty members from Linguistics are currently team-teaching the GenEd
interdisciplinary "core" courses with faculty from other departments, thereby exposing large numbers of
new students to linguistic concepts. One has been teaching the National Issues core course and another
the Scientific Issues core course. Because most undergraduates are first introduced to linguistics through
general education courses, this has been a primary source of undergraduate linguistics majors. The
department anticipates attracting a new cohort of students into the linguistics program from the large
groups of first and second year undergraduates taking these Core Courses.
g. The current requirements for the M.A., implemented in the fall of 1997, include a set of six
required courses in traditional areas of Linguistics plus a one-credit research requirement and six electives
selected from two groups of electives in Applied Linguistics. The first group of electives provides
students with training in several core areas of Applied Linguistics. The second group of electives allows
students to study more specialized topics within these fields. Candidates for certification in TESL take a
specified set of four electives plus two free electives. The requirements for the MA are:
I.
Required courses: (19 semester hours)
APLN 500
Language and Linguistics
APLN 502
Sociolinguistics
APLN 504
Syntax
APLN 505
Semantics and Pragmatics
APLN 506
Phonetics and Phonology
APLN 508
Research Design in Applied Linguistics
APLN 605
Independent Research (1 s.h.)
II.
Electives - Group I: Students select at least two courses from among the following core areas of
applied linguistics and an additional four courses from either this list or from Group II Electives.
(Please see the Department Course Listings for the full list of courses which includes a total of
thirty-two courses.) (18 semester hours)
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
10
APLN 510
APLN 520
APLN 530
APLN 540
APLN 550
APLN 560
APLN 570
Discourse Analysis
Current Theories of Second Language Acquisition
Language Policy and Language Planning
Literacy
Computational Linguistics
Translation Theory
The Structure of American Sign Language
Curriculum Commentary
The undergraduate curriculum for the major in Linguistics has remained largely unchanged in the
past five years. The structure of the requirements continues to reflect the overall field of linguistics and
continues to effectively serve the needs of the students enrolled in the program. Innovations in the
curriculum have been made through Selected Topics courses and through updating of the current course
offerings.
Selected Topics courses are offered on a regular basis to allow students to study topics that are
not part of the regular course offerings and are often designed to introduce students to new subfields of
Linguistics. Two recent selected topics courses were taught by research linguists who served as visiting
specialists from their respective fields: Two researchers from Lucent Bell Labs co-taught a course in
Language Modeling and the president of LinguisTech offered a course in Speech and Language
Processing. Selected topics courses, offered at the 400 level, can also be taken for credit by graduate
students thus these courses serve a dual scheduling purpose.
In the past five years the department has offered the following selected topics courses:
Spring 1999:
Summer 2002:
Summer 2003:
Fall 2003:
Structure of Japanese
Modeling Language Phenomena
Speech and Language Processing
Corpus Linguistics
Existing courses are regularly updated in content and also in “delivery” reflecting advances both
in the field and in available technology. LNGN 220 - Structure of American English is now taught as a
corpus linguistics course with students drawing on data from corpora to support various hypotheses about
English grammatical patterns and usage. LNGN 325 - Principles of Second Language Learning includes a
component that has linguistics students negotiating tasks with ESL students through Internet Relay Chat
and WebCams. LNGN 331 - Phonetics relies more on the recording an analysis of speech using signal
processing software including xwaves and WaveSurfer. In addition, all of the faculty in linguistics rely on
the web for presentation of syllabi and class assignments. Two faculty members use BlackBoard
extensively, primarily because it provides students with access to assigned readings online. Other faculty
use the library's online reserve facility for this purpose.
Nine of the department’s undergraduate linguistics courses have been modified to bring them in
line with the new GenEd Requirements. In addition, two new courses are currently being developed for
the GenEd program: a course that introduces current issues of importance in language and linguistics and
a course in laboratory phonetics.
Overall, the linguistics undergraduate curriculum undergoes constant adjustments as faculty
regularly adopt new textbooks and respond in a variety of ways to feedback from students. The existing
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
11
rotation of courses remains firm, which allows students to plan their schedules in order to graduate in a
timely fashion. A description of the rotation of courses can be found in Appendix I of this document.
The Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics remains strong. Student enrollments are healthy, the
level of ability reflected in the work of students has gone up, and past issues involving advising, the MA
comprehensive exams, and the independent research requirement have been fine-tuned. The course
offerings in computational linguistics have been enriched through the selected topics option and the
addition to the curriculum of the TESOL Certificate has been of use to many international MA students.
Significant changes in the ESL curriculum have occurred since 1998. The credit and non-credit
courses have been united under the supervision of the Linguistics Department. A new plan has been
implemented to identify and test students at MSU who are in need of ESL instruction. Advanced level
ESL courses are in the process of being recognized as World Language courses that will satisfy the
GenEd language requirement.
In summary, the basic offerings in the Linguistics Department remain strong and stable and are in
line with Linguistics curricula throughout the United States. Where a need for change and growth has
been identified, the department has responded by implementing alternations to course offerings and by
making adjustments to existing courses.
2. Advising
A university-wide undergraduate advising program is in place which provides for advising
through a student’s major department. In theory, each semester, the Academic Advisor meets
individually with each student and works out a program of study, which includes general education
requirements, major requirements, and electives. In Linguistics, the job of advising has been shared
among the faculty. As the department’s programs have expanded, the job of advising has become
somewhat more specialized. Three faculty members share the responsibility of advising the undergraduate
liberal arts majors. One of these three also advises students enrolled in the Master of Arts in Teaching
(MAT). (The MAT allows post-baccalaureate students to combine a major in linguistics with a graduate
level teacher-education sequence leading to New Jersey State K-12 certification in TESL as a first
teaching field.) A fourth faculty member is the Teacher Education Coordinator, and does all advising
(undergraduate and graduate) related to TESL certification and to the TESOL certificate. A fifth faculty
member is the graduate advisor for the Master of Arts students. A sixth faculty member, as the ESL coordinator, provides back-up advising to ESL students, although these students have majors in other
departments and rely on their major advisors for most advising. Teaching loads are slightly reduced for
the Teacher Education Coordinator, the ESL advisor/coordinator, and the Graduate Advisor, and varying
amounts of their “on-load” assignments are designated as administrative. The advisors for the majors are
compensated with "overload" adjustments.
An improved and expanded on-line Student-Information-System (SIS) and a new online
registration system within Student Self-Services have helped eliminate some of the difficulties with the
university’s advising system but many of the problems with the undergraduate advising system which
were identified in 1998 persist. As then, these are not all issues which are peculiar to Linguistics. Briefly,
the average faculty member is hampered from doing high quality advisement because of (1) a lack of
training in counseling; (2) an insufficient familiarity with a wide range of academic programs and
departments as these constantly expand and change; (3) a somewhat limited knowledge of all of the
relevant University-wide requirements, which is a result of the two different General Education
Requirements in existence. (Students operate under whichever requirement was in place at the time that
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
12
they first matriculate.) (4) limited access to part-time students who do not always appear for advisement.
Perhaps the greatest problem with advising is (5) the serious time restrictions that faculty face, since both
career counseling and complicated advising issues can consume several hours per student. A particular
problem that sometimes hampers advising for MAT students is the limited coordination with the College
of Education and Human Services. In general, the faculty are of the opinion that advising at Montclair
would best serve the students if it were done by a professional advising staff in the Academic Advising
Center with the department doing the advising for the major only.
A number of the difficulties associated with the advising system reside with the students
themselves, and again, these issues are not unique to the Linguistics Department. Although in principle it
is valuable for students to have one academic adviser who oversees their entire undergraduate or graduate
education, many students do not take full advantage of their advisors. They either do not seek advisement
before registering or arrive at an advisement session having already fixed their work schedule based on
the courses that they have decided to take. It is not uncommon for students to fail to read the available
information about major requirements, university regulations, or graduation requirements. As a result,
when students run into difficulty, they sometimes direct their frustration at the faculty advisor and argue
that they were given insufficient guidance. Still another problem arises from the Linguistics Department’s
required 3.0 grade-point average for entry into the TESL teacher-education program. Students who do not
meet this requirement understandably feel that they have spent two years taking courses toward a program
that they cannot enter and, subsequently, find fault with the advising system.
In addition to the one-on-one advising that students have available to them, at the beginning of
each semester, the Linguistics Department hosts two “Orientation” meetings for current and prospective
students. One meeting is for undergraduates and one is for graduate students. At these orientations, the
faculty are introduced, a department handbook is distributed, and the requirements for the various degree
programs offered by the linguistics department are reviewed. These orientations allow students to ask
questions and to get to know both the faculty and one another. Refreshments are served at these meetings
and representatives from various administrative offices on campus are often invited. The Dean of the
Graduate School (or her representative) and the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
(or his representative) frequently attend the Graduate Orientation meeting.
As another conduit for information, the department has initiated a brown-bag lunch program,
"Lunch with Linguists." At these informal meetings, students join faculty once a month (on a different
day each month) for a casual lunch to share information about courses, requirements, career options, and
research. The department faculty hope that the additional source of information provided at these
gatherings will help linguistics majors in ways that the more formal advising system sometimes does not.
3. Co-curricular Activities
In addition to the classroom teaching, the Linguistics Department has continued or begun several
initiatives in the past five years that have greatly enhanced the intellectual atmosphere of the department
and our students' perception of themselves as budding professionals in Linguistics. These initiatives
include the establishment of many relationships with linguists and programs outside of Montclair State as
well as the enhancement of facilities for exchange within the department.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
13
Activities with linguists outside of Montclair State
Lectures
The Linguistics Department sponsors public lectures that it organizes and advertises through the
Montclair Linguistics Association, a student-run organization, and through the Cognitive Science
colloquium. The Cognitive Science Colloquium pools the resources of five departments -Communication Sciences and Disorders, Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology -in order to bring high-caliber speakers to the campus to speak for what is primarily an undergraduate
audience. Typically, over 100 students and faculty attend these lectures. Recent lectures include:
Deborah Cameron (London University) Language Testing and Gender
Svetlana Decheva (Moscow State University) A Cognitive Linguistics Approach to Accent
Reduction
Adriana Haluskova (Comenius) English Language Education in Eastern Europe.
Jana Hromnikova (Comenius) Language Education in the Former Soviet World
James Imhoff (Montclair;Music) Parallels between Music and Language
Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers) Towards a Philosophy of Mind
Ben Schniederman (Maryland) Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing
Technologies
Janet Dean Fodor (CUNY). Prosodic Disambiguation in Silent Reading
Lila Gleitmann (Penn) Does the Language We Speak Affect the Way We Think?
Gabriela Lojova (Comenius) Will We Ever Know How to Teach A Language?
Minkyu Lee (Lucent Bell Labs), Speech Synthesis and Voice Conversion at Bell Labs
Robert Coyne (AT&T Labs) WordsEye, an automatic text-to-scene conversion system
Richard Repka (Comenius) The Prague School of Linguistics and English Language Teaching
Wendalyn Nichols (Random House) The Professional Lexicographer
Longxing Wei and Steve Seegmiller. Linguistic Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great
Gatsby.
Scholar Exchange
In the spring of 2003, the Linguistics Department benefited from a faculty exchange with
Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. Gabriela Lojova, of the English Department in the
Pedagogical Faculty at Comenius spent the spring semester at Montclair, where she taught a course in
Methodology of TESL and conducted a research project involving the teaching of English.
Simultaneously, Mary Call of the Montclair Linguistics Department spent the spring semester in
Bratislava, where she taught psycholinguistics to students in the Pedagogical Faculty who are preparing to
teach English as a foreign language. Dr. Call also gathered data for her research project on differences in
academic culture. Both faculty members profited from their experiences and, since both received
Fulbright grants for their projects, they are planning to apply for a Fulbright Alumni Grant to support
future cooperation between MSU and Comenius.
The department has also benefited from the presence of several visiting scholars in the past five
years, including:
Yousef Al-Halis, a phonologist from the University of Jordan this year visited during AY 2001-02 to do
research on English phonology.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
14
Xiaolin Me, an Associate Professor of English from Chongging in the People’s Republic of China did
research on second language acquisition during AY2000-01.
Juan Zhao, an Assistant Professor of English from Hebei Normal University in the People's Republic of
China is currently visiting the department to do research in second/foreign language teaching. Her one
year visit is fully sponsored by the Chinese government.
Montclair in Shanghai
The Linguistics Department, in conjunction with Montclair State's Global Education Center, has
designed and developed a summer study abroad program: Montclair in Shanghai – Chinese Culture and
Environment. The program plans to take about 15 students from Montclair State to study at the East
China Normal University in Shanghai in the summer of 2004. For the program, students are required to
take a course in either Chinese Civilization or History and electives, which include Chinese Language and
Linguistics Analysis of Chinese.
The Linguistics Department Advisory Board
In June 1999, the Linguistics Department invited a group of linguists whose work takes place in
non-academic settings to serve on a Linguistics Department Advisory Board. The Board was to provide
input for the department on many topics related to Linguistics outside of the academy. On curriculum,
members of the Board would be able to make suggestions that would allow Linguistics to modify its
curriculum in ways that corresponded to the sorts of training that Board Members identified as necessary
in their own work. They would also be a source of information about jobs and activities for linguistics
students that exist outside of academia. Furthermore, it was anticipated that this group would keep the
faculty abreast of potential applications of linguistics research outside of academia. This initiative has
provided outstanding benefits to the department.
The individuals who serve on the Linguistics Department the Advisory Board work in many
different areas of linguistics (computational linguistics, lexicography, language education, etc.) and in
various industries, organizations, and government agencies. The Board has met annually for the past five
consecutive years, from 1999 to 2003 and will meet again in June 2004. Current members of the board
are:
Joan Bachenko, LinguisTech Consortium
Scott Bennett, Logos-USA
Nicholas Bruno, Supervisor Bloomfield NJ School District
Roy Byrd, IBM
Jill Burstein, Educational Testing Service
Donna Christian, Center for Applied Linguistics
Robert French, Educational Testing Service
Melissa Holland, Army Research Labs
Janice Jensen, NJ Dept of Education
Marian Macchi, Espeech
Wendalyn Nichols, Random House Reference Publishing
Raul Rodriguez (ex officio) Universidad Del Valle De Atemajac (UNIVA), Guadalajara, Mexico
Chilin Shih, Linguistics Dept. U of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana (formerly of Lucent Bell Labs)
Evelyne Tzoukermann, Streamsage Inc.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
15
The Advisory Board has far exceeded the original hopes for an auxiliary group to aid the
department. Its members have provided a wealth of opportunities for students and faculty, as well as for
the university. Board members have been instrumental in securing grants for the department, in providing
excellent job opportunities for students and alumni, as well as providing consulting opportunities for the
linguistics faculty. Several board members have given talks and/or taught courses for the department. In
addition, board members have functioned as outside readers for MA candidate research papers. Finally,
three board members have collaborated on two grant proposals that originated in the Linguistics
Department.
Conference Hosting
The Linguistics Department has been asked to host the Fifth North American Symposium on
Corpus Linguistics, a conference run under the auspices of the “American Association for Applied
Corpus Linguistics.” The Symposium will take place at Montclair State from May 21 to May 23, 2004.
The department anticipates that approximately 150 participants from Asia, Europe, and North America
will attend the symposium.
The burgeoning area of corpus linguistics unites work in computational methods with work in
applications such as language teaching and lexicography; as such, this area fits well with the
concentrations in the department’s curricular offerings. Corpus Linguistics has proven to be a fruitful area
of research for several members of the linguistics faculty.
Grants and research
Grants Received
The Linguistics Department has been a strong participant in the university's endeavor to meet the
Carnegie criteria for classification as a Doctoral/Research University-Intensive institution, securing grants
and providing research opportunities for students in the varied areas of applied linguistics. These grants
include:
State of New Jersey. $150,000. Education of Language Minority Students (ELMS) grant. September
1999.
State of New Jersey. $3,000. Materials support for Education of Language Minority Students (ELMS)
grant. September 1999.
Lucent Technologies. $16,500. Speech Segmentation. Sept. 2000.
Linguistech Inc. $20,000. The Automation of the Detection of Deception in Written and Spoken Legal
Testimony. June 2003.
Army Research Laboratory. $25,000. Development of an Arabic-English Medical Lexicon for Machine
Translation. January 2004
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
16
Several faculty members have also received funding for individual research projects, primarily from
internal Montclair State Grants. With research university status as a goal, Montclair State has been
generous in providing seed money for work that has the potential for a larger outside grant. These grants
include:
Mary Call - Fulbright award for study at Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia.
Eileen Fitzpatrick - $2250. MSU Separately Budgeted Research Award. Development of a Language
Learner Database (MELD). 2001.
Alice F. Freed - $1000. MSU Alumni Association Faculty Grant. Gender Talk: Language, Sex,
and Gender Revisited. 1999.
Alice F. Freed - $1200. MSU Separately Budgeted Research Award. Gender Talk: Language, Sex, and
Gender Revisited. 1999.
Steve Seegmiller (with David Townsend (Psychology)). $2,000. MSU Student-Faculty Research Award.
Spoken Sentence Comprehension. 2003.
Steve Seegmiller (with David Townsend (Psychology)), $4,000. Grant Proposal Development Award
from the
MSU Research Committee for a National Science Foundation proposal on The Use of Temporal
Information in Understanding Narrative Discourse. 2003.
Susana Sotillo. $640. MSU Graduate Dean's Aware. Creation of an Online Corpus of Metaphors and
Euphemisms. 2003.
Longxing Wei $800. MSU Global Education Research Grant for the research project ‘Activation of
Lemmas in the Bilingual Mental Lexicon and Language Assignment in Bilingual Production’.
2003.
Longxing Wei. $4000. Grant Proposal Development Award from the MSU Research Committee for the
National Science Foundation (NSF) grant proposal: ‘The Bilingual Mental Lexicon:
Codeswitching and Bilingual Production Process’. 2003.
Grants Submitted
The faculty have also submitted several grant proposals to the National Science Foundation in the
last two years. Having received relatively favorable reviews, these proposals are being revised for
resubmission. These proposals include:
Eileen Fitzpatrick (PI), Chilin Shih, and Greg Kochanski. Articulatory Modeling of Segment Duration.
Steve Seegmiller and David Townsend (PI). RUI: Processing Events in Sentences and Texts.
Longxing Wei. 2003. The Bilingual Mental Lexicon: Codeswitching and Bilingual Production Process.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
17
Information Exchange
Linguistics maintains a department webpage that lists upcoming activities, conferences, course
offerings and general information about faculty and programs.
The department also maintains list-servs for the faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate
students. These list-servs enable the faculty to broadcast announcements about talks, job openings, etc.
They also allow students to interact with other members of the list-serv.
The department also uses the MSU Alumni Association's lists of department alumni (both
electronic and surface mail) to inform alumni of upcoming events in the department.
4. Special Student Opportunities
The size of the Linguistics Department and the manageable number of linguistics students,
usually around 100 combined in any one semester including linguistics majors and graduate students,
assure that enrollments in advanced required courses, major electives, and most graduate courses, can be
held steady at no more than l5-30 students. Only in courses that are also General Education courses and
some graduate courses that serve both TESL certification students and MA students, do enrollments
exceed 30. As a result, all of the full-time faculty as well as some of the adjunct faculty have the
opportunity to get to know all of the majors and all of the graduate students personally. This allows for an
excellent atmosphere for the exchange of ideas.
Graduate Honor Society
Since its introduction at Montclair State three years ago, the Linguistics Department has had six
students inducted into Alpha Kappa Epsilon National Graduate Honor Society.
Graduate Assistantships
Since the establishment of the Master of Arts program, the department has had the opportunity to
offer graduate assistantships to a number of students. In 1995-96 the department had its first graduate
assistant. The following year, the department was granted two graduate assistantships. Since 1998, the
department has had three graduate assistantships supported by the university. This has been a great benefit
to students and faculty alike as it has provided students with the opportunity to teach and to participate in
research projects with the faculty, while giving the faculty the opportunity to work with bright and
enthusiastic assistants.
One of the three graduate assistantships in the department is dedicated to the support of a
master's candidate from the Universidad Del Valle De Atemajac (UNIVA) in Guadalajara, Mexico. The
collaboration and exchange between the Universidad Del Valle De Atemajac (UNIVA) in Guadalajara,
Mexico and the Linguistics Department at Montclair State, established in 1996 as an exchange for
students and faculty, remains strong. The Linguistics Department at MSU has now welcomed four
graduate students from the EFL faculty at UNIVA into the MA program. Each student spends a full two
years at Montclair. This year for the first time a linguistics student from Montclair is at UNIVA making
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
18
this the sort of exchange that was originally envisioned. The department is working to identify future
students and faculty who might be able to take advantage of this opportunity.
Internships/Externships
Since the inception of its Advisory Board in 1999, the Linguistics Department has established
relationships with several business entities and government agencies that have given linguistics students
the opportunity to be employed, either on campus or at the worksite, as practicing linguists. These
situations include:
Employer
Army Research Lab
Worksite
Dept. lab
AT&T Labs
Florham Park
Lab
Educational Testing Svc
LinguisTech
Consortium
Princeton offices
Dept. lab
Lucent Bell Labs
Proteus Project, NYU
Dept. lab
NYU
Random House
NYC
State of New Jersey
Dept.
MSB/VOX
Wayne , NJ
Offices
Job
creation of Arabic-English
medical dictionary (MT project)
orthographic transcription of
discourse; phonetic segmentation
and labeling
grading of essay questions
annotation of discourse features
in legal testimony; programming
to classify testimony by
discourse features
phonetic segmentation
Japanese named-entity
annotation; text summarization
creation of entries for a World
English dictionary
administration & tutoring for
ELMS grant
Review, organization, and
assistance with transcriptions of
doctor-patient interviews
Employee
2 grad students
1 grad student
1 grad student
3 undergrads (1 from
computer science)
2 grad students
2 undergrads
1 grad student
1 grad student
1 alumna
2 grad students
2 undergrads
Funded projects within the college have also provided employment and job experience in linguistics for
students. These projects include:
Project
MELD (Montclair
Language Database)
Job
Electronic error annotation of ESL essays
database programming
data management
website creation
Sentence Processing
administering experiments
coding experimental data
tagging patterns in data
Metaphor identification
annotation of metaphors
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
Employee
3 grad students
1 undergrad
3 ESL teachers (former grad
students)
2 undergrads
2 grad students
2 undergrads
19
These employment opportunities not only provide funding for students but also give them a sophisticated
picture of concrete career options in linguistics. As these opportunities increase, the faculty see a need to
attract more honors level students and are entertaining ways of inviting high-caliber students to opt for
linguistics as a major.
Student Publications and Presentations
Students are increasingly seeking out venues in which to publish and present. Since 1998, the following
students, both graduate and undergraduate, have publicly presented or are scheduled to present their work:
Ann Evans. Language rights of ethnic Macedonians in Greece. The Fifth International Macedonian-North
American Conference on Macedonian Studies. April 2003. Ohio State University.
Jennifer Higgins. Prosodic phrasing in radio broadcast news. The Fifth North American Symposium of the
American Association for Applied Corpus Linguistics. Montclair State University, May 2004.
Karen Ingraffea (with faculty members David Townsend and M.S. Seegmiller). The role of event
structure in comprehending garden path sentences. Poster at Ninth Annual Conference on
Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing. August 2003.
Norma Pravec. 2002. Survey of Learner Corpora. ICAME Journal. No. 25. June 2002.
Susie Sehulster and Katharine Thomas. Development of Lexical and Syntactic Complexity in ParentChild Conversations. The Fifth North American Symposium of the American Association for
Applied Corpus Linguistics. Montclair State University, May 2004.
Henry Ten-Tann. Calculating the frequency of Taiwanese function words using a new corpus of
Romanized texts. 2002 Conference on Pedagogy and Research of Taiwanese Romanization. July
2002. Taitung, Taiwan.
Graduate Student Mini-conference
Since 1995, the department has sponsored graduate student “mini-conferences” at which Master of Arts
students present twenty-minute formal papers related to the work they are doing on their independent
research project. For the past two years, these presentations have run in conjunction with the annual
Advisory Board meeting, enabling students to get feedback from a wider audience of linguists as well as
from their own faculty and peers. Appendix III gives a listing of completed MA papers from the past five
years.
Clubs and Student Support
Tutoring and study support
For the past several years, thanks to the addition of a third Graduate Assistant, the department has
run a tutoring center for undergraduate students in linguistics; the center is entirely run by one of the
department’s graduate assistants and most successfully so when the GA is a student who had been an
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
20
undergraduate Linguistics major here at Montclair State. ESL tutoring is also offered by one of the GAs,
with one-on-one sessions available for 15 hours each week.
In addition, the department faculty generally encourage students to form study groups before
exams, having found that this works well for many students and creates a sense of camaraderie among
them. This has been most successful at the graduate level and particularly effective when MA students are
studying for the Master’s comprehensive examination. The department also offers a faculty-run workshop
to prepare for the comprehensives.
Student Organization
The Montclair Linguistics Association, a student organization for Linguistics majors formed in
the fall of 1998, continues to function within the department. With the assistance of a Linguistics
Department faculty member, social events and a variety of lectures are sponsored each semester. The
effectiveness of the organization depends on the availability of interested students and the energy of the
leaders of the group in any academic year. The faculty would like to find a way to insure a higher level of
participation and activity for this group.
Chinese and Japanese Clubs
Thanks to the tremendous efforts of one of the department’s visiting specialists, an active club has
been formed for students interested in Chinese and Japanese culture. The club holds both regular cultural
events, such as a Chinese New Year celebration, and a variety of fund-raising events. The cultural events
are advertised university-wide and include food and entertainment. The clubs also hold regular meetings
during which, depending on the club, only Chinese or Japanese is spoken.
Career Workshop in Communication Sciences and Disorders
In recognition of the growth of the number of majors interested in pursuing graduate education in
speech pathology and related fields, the Linguistics Department recently held a 2-hour workshop on
graduate studies in speech pathology and audiology. The workshop allowed current linguistics majors to
hear from linguistics majors who have graduated from Montclair’s program and have gone on to do
graduate work in this field; they also heard a presentation from a faculty member in Montclair's graduateonly Communication Sciences and Disorders department. Six undergraduates participated, and all have
applied to several graduate schools in this field. We plan to hold this workshop annually.
C. Outcomes: Programs and Student Learning
1. Testing, Evaluation, and Assessments
Linguistics Courses: Testing and evaluation of student performance and achievement, at both the
undergraduate and graduate level, are carried out by means of various course-specific assignments,
research projects, course examinations, and final grades. Because the faculty is small and experienced
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
21
and has regular close contact with students, no other formal assessment tool is routinely used in
Linguistics.
TESL Certification: The linguistics courses that are part of the required sequence for TESL
certification have explicit assessment standards as specified by the National Council for Accreditation of
Teacher Education (NCATE). The department has recently submitted extensive documentation to
NCATE on our TESL program and courses, including these standards and sample work from students
exemplifying the standards.
M.A. Degree: At the completion of all required course work (and usually also after completing
their electives) all students seeking the Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics must take and pass a written
comprehensive examination. This exam, given each fall and each spring, consists of two three-hour
sessions, given at least one week apart. Students must answer two of three questions for each part of the
exam; one part of the exam is based on the required courses, and the other part is based on the specific set
of electives that each individual student has taken.
ESL Courses: Within the ESL component, there are specific exit criteria associated with the
intermediate, advanced, and graduate levels that are used to determine a student's readiness to move from
one level of the program to the next or to exit the ESL program.
2. Retention
Retention patterns in the Linguistics Department vary by program but, in general, are quite good.
The discussion below is based on the retention figures found in Appendix II of this document.
Undergraduate Majors
The retention pattern for students majoring in linguistics has been excellent. The majority of the
students who leave the major do so by graduating. In recent semesters, only 1 or 2 students have
transferred to another major. In general, students in linguistics seem to change majors or leave Montclair
State University for reasons unrelated to the quality of the department's teaching or the students’
experience in the department. For example, of five students who dropped the linguistics major in the
spring of 2003 two left to pursue an undergraduate degree in speech pathology at St. John's University in
New York (Montclair does not offer this as an undergraduate degree), two dropped out of college
altogether (one because of a difficult family situation and one because of serious illness). The one student
who changed majors was an older transfer student who was able to graduate more quickly by returning to
her original major using the transfer credits she had earned from this major.
Graduate Programs
The three graduate programs, the MA in Applied Linguistics, the 2nd field certification program in TESL,
and the TESOL certificate program all show high retention.
MA in Applied Linguistics
Retention figures for students accepted into the Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics are quite
good. There have been, however, several students who complete the course work and pass the MA
comprehensive examination but do not complete their research requirement and thus do not graduate with
an MA in Applied Linguistics. Students get jobs, move, and in some cases, decide that they have profited
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
22
from the education they have received without obtaining the actual degree; some of these students have a
Master’s degree in another field completed before entering the program. These factors affect the retention
numbers for the MA program.
There have also been some graduate students who have had difficulty completing their required
MA research paper. In order to provide more guidance for these students, the faculty have held research
workshops to help them finish and have occasionally included successful papers from past students as
part of the required reading for appropriate courses, thus giving current students a model of what
successful master’s level research consists of.
Post B.A. TESL
Retention for the post-B.A. TESL students is quite high. Most of these students regularly report
that they chose Montclair because of the Department's excellent reputation. While the 18 credit post-BA
TESL program can be completed in two semesters, most students take only 3 or 6 credits a semester,
which explains why the graduation rates lag behind the enrollment rates. This does not appear to have
been the case in the spring of 2003, however, when a robust contingent graduated with 2nd field
certification (see Appendix II).
TESOL
The new TESOL program is already showing a good growth trend. This certificate was
implemented only two years ago and the department is anticipating its first graduates this spring. Many of
the students who are working towards the TESOL certificate are also MA candidates, in the middle of a
longer degree program. Several new students have applied to this program from overseas, particularly
from Korea. Students interested in this certificate are reporting that they wish to teach English abroad and
see this certificate as giving them an edge in the language teaching field of TESOL.
3. Activities of Graduates
The activities former linguistics students are difficult to report since no formal mechanism exists
for recording job placement for graduates. However, the department has been able to record the initial
placement for most of its graduates. These placements are reported here.
a. Linguistics Majors: Of the 58 students who graduated with a BA in Linguistics over the past
five years, the largest number either became teachers or went on to graduate school. The remainder went
on to any interesting mix of jobs, many in language-related professions. The numbers we have available
are:
16 ESL teaching in NJ Public Schools
15 Graduate School:
MSU Linguistics: 4
MSU CS&D: 4
Rutgers (Law): 1
Kean (K-12 certification): 1
Seton Hall (speech pathology): 1
Columbia (Japanese): 1
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
23
3
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
Middlebury (Spanish): 1
NYU (linguistics): 1
Boston College: 1
EFL teaching (1 Spain; 2 Japan)
Administrative assistants
Translator
Court interpreter
Spanish Teacher (Bergen Catholic)
Computational linguist (Regulatory DataCorp)
Community college program coordinator (Bergen County CC)
Discourse annotator (AT&T Labs)
b. Second field TESL students: Most of the students who enroll in the department’s post-BA
TESL program are already teaching in an area school. Upon completion of this second certificate, these
students are able to teach more than one subject matter in the schools where they are employed.
c. Graduate students: The students who graduate with either an MA in Linguistics or an MAT
from the department over the past five years are in a variety of professions, almost all of which are using
their training in linguistics. These include:
Admin asst. Liberty Mutual
Annotator; translator (Proteus project; NYU)
Coordinator for EFL curriculum, UNIVA, Mexico
Coordinator for EFL teachers in the Centro de Lenguas Extranjeras, UNIVA, Mexico
Director, Universidad a Distancia, UNIVA, Mexico
ESL teacher (MAT)
ESL teacher; MSU
ESL teacher; Seattle WA
ESL teacher; Verona public school district
Grad school; Columbia Teacher's College
Grade school language teacher
High School Spanish/Italian teacher, Parsippany NJ
Middle School teacher, Newark NJ
Publishing/editing
Principal, Alghazaly High School, Teaneck NJ
Software instructor; Passaic County CC
Translator
Three students who are close to completing their master's degree have also recently obtained jobs
directly related to their training in linguistics; one is a German teacher with a long-term contract at
Columbia University, one is teaching Spanish and ESL at Brescia University in Kentucky on a tenuretrack line, and one is an ESL textbook development editor at Cambridge University Press. All three
students remain in contact with the department and are working on their master's papers.
Given the applied nature of the linguistics program at Montclair, it is not surprising that the
majority of our students have found jobs related to language and linguistics. Nevertheless, the department
is proud that so many students have established real careers in the field.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
24
D. Faculty
The Linguistics Department is presently composed of six full-time faculty members, all with
tenure. Our most recent additions to the department were one faculty member in 1996 and one in 1997.
All members of the department remain current in the field and in their particular areas of specialization
through extensive reading, attendance at meetings, scholarly research, and through the wide range of
teaching responsibilities necessary in a department of this size. The members of the department have also
been actively involved in innovations in teaching and constantly exchange ideas about their classes. This
is accomplished in part by a frequent rotation of courses, by updating the curriculum when needed, and by
encouraging and funding attendance at conferences dealing with Linguistics and with language education.
In addition, each year the department hires between ten and thirteen adjunct faculty members and
two visiting specialists. The department considers itself fortunate to be able to recruit and keep talented
and dedicated adjunct faculty, despite low salaries and crowded working conditions. Recently, however,
adjunct salaries have been raised in several semesters, which is beginning to make these positions
competitive.
The faculty teaching load is 12 teaching credit hours (TCH) per semester. A Faculty Scholarship
Incentive Program (FSIP), instituted a decade ago, enables faculty to substitute work towards published
research for 3 TCH per semester. All members of the Linguistics Department are engaged in work
supported by FSIP.
Faculty descriptions are listed below. Detailed vitae for the department's full-time faculty have
been sent by surface mail. Released time figures are per academic year.
Mary E. Call. Associate Professor, undergraduate major advisor, ESL coordinator (3 TCH released time).
Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, 1979. 2nd language acquisition, TESL, foreign language education,
language and culture, international exchange programs. (Knowledge of Spanish and French, familiarity
with Greek and Slovak.)
Eileen Fitzpatrick. Associate Professor, chair (12 TCH released time) Ph.D., New York University, 1985.
Phonetics, syntax/prosody interface, computational linguistics. (Knowledge of Farsi.)
Alice F. Freed. Professor; MAT advisor, undergraduate major advisor. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,
1976. Discourse analysis, language and culture, sociolinguistics, semantics and pragmatics; language and
gender research. (Knowledge of French.)
Milton S. Seegmiller. Professor; Graduate Advisor (3 TCH released time). Ph.D., New York University,
1974. Syntactic and phonological theory, historical linguistics, language planning and language policy,
sign-language linguistics, Turkic languages. (Knowledge of American Sign Language, Russian, Spanish,
and Turkish.)
Susana Sotillo Associate Professor; undergraduate major advisor. Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania,
1991. Second language acquisition, educational linguistics, bilingualism, sociolinguistics, TESL, and
computer-mediated instruction. (Knowledge of Spanish and German.)
Longxing Wei. Associate Professor; Teacher Education Coordinator (6 TCH released time). Ph.D. 1996.
University of South Carolina. Second language acquisition, bilingualism, code-switching,
sociolinguistics. (Knowledge of Mandarin, German, and Japanese.)
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
25
E. Facilities
Each department in the college has its own seminar room, which provides a classroom or meeting
space scheduled at the department’s discretion. Because of space limitations, however, the department’s
seminar room is often used for classes. This means that there is no room available for meetings, nor is
there a place for students to congregate. The department is also in need of an ESL resource center, a place
for students to meet, and additional space for the growing linguistics library that the department is
assembling. Offices for full-time faculty, though adequate, are scattered in several different parts of
Dickson Hall preventing the department from having a sense of a Linguistics Center. Office space for
adjuncts and graduate assistants is grossly inadequate as it is limited to a single room for the ten or more
adjuncts each semester.
A new, large classroom building is under construction immediately to the north of Dickson Hall,
which promises to relieve much of the need for classroom space by AY05-06, and provide space within
Dickson for the needs enumerated above.
Due to recurring budgetary restrictions the department is periodically faced with inadequate
amounts of money for office supplies, money for photocopying, and travel.
Computer and Laboratory Facilities: The Montclair State University campus now has sizable
computer facilities for both students and faculty. All full-time faculty are provided with state-of-the art
computers for their offices; computer support is available through the College's Technical Support Team.
The College of Humanities and Social Sciences has two large computer-based classrooms, a small
computer classroom, a translation laboratory, and a language laboratory. The language laboratory is open
six days a week, for as many as twelve hours daily from Monday through Thursday. Additional computer
laboratories are located around the campus. The College of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has other
significant computer resources. All undergraduate and graduate students have Montclair ISP e-mail
accounts which provide them with access to the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The Department is well-supported by the Language Learning Technology group within the
College, which gives Linguistics students access to the facilities of the translation and language
laboratories, which include:
 a dual 1.8GHz Xeon processor server running Linux (baboon)
 20 laptop computers and one teacher desktop computer configured for analysis of speech in
the Translation Laboratory including advanced presentation technology
 2 sound proof-booths
 30 desktop computers, including MACs, and Dells running both Windows and Linux,
 2 teacher computers and advanced presentation technology in the Language Laboratory
 a faculty development and materials production area including Mac, Windows and Linux
computers with digital audio and video capabilities, scanning, and graphic design and
audio/video production software. The development and materials production area also has
analog audio and linear video production equipment.
The department also owns several analog and digital tape recorders and transcribers.
We also have access to software and corpora purchased for language and translation lab use,
including:
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
26







the SynSen formant synthesizer
Waves+ signal processing software
the British National Corpus
the TIMIT speech Corpus
the European Corpus Initiative MultiLingual Corpora
the Boston University Radio Speech Corpus
the Santa Barbara speech corpus
The department feels fortunate in terms of the facilities at its disposal, except, as indicated above,
with regard to space. The translation lab is an excellent site for laboratory-based courses like corpus
linguistics, computational linguistics, and the acoustics portion of phonetics. However, it is small and the
linguistics faculty must defer to faculty teaching translation courses when these require the lab.
Linguistics is now designing a laboratory phonetics course that is intended to be a General Education
course; it is anticipated that the course will attract more than the 18-20 students that the translation lab can
accommodate. The director of Language Learning Technology, the Communication Sciences and
Disorders Department, and the Linguistics Department are amenable to the possibility of a larger, shared
lab in the spaces that will become available in Dickson when the new classroom building is finished.
F. LIBRARY AND TECHNOLOGY RESOURCES
The linguistics collection at Montclair State University, housed in Sprague Library, was the most
comprehensive modern linguistics collection in the New York Metropolitan area until two or three years
ago. Currently, more than 8,700 book titles are available, in addition to many of the major journals in the
fields of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics.
Four years ago, the faculty member who had done a remarkable job of maintaining a current and
vibrant linguistics collection for a period of 30 years, and who continued with this assignment past
retirement, was discontinued by the administration. At around the same time, a member of the library’s
professional staff was designated as liaison for linguistics. As might have been anticipated, this individual
has not been able to perform this duty with the breadth of knowledge that a professor of linguistics can
bring to the task. Further complicating the situation was the fact that the linguistics faculty has been
operating under the incorrect assumption that there was a significant reduction in library funding for new
book acquisitions. Both of these facts explain why the linguistics collection is not now completely
current; the faculty simply did not know that it had to take up the practice of ordering new books on a
regular basis. With this new understanding, the linguistics faculty can (and will) immediately begin
rectifying the situation, taking advantage of the electronic order form available through the library’s home
page.
In general, library services are excellent. A wide array of on-line services is available through
library and other data-bases. Large numbers of journals important to the field of Linguistics are also
available electronically, although these are primary issues from the past five years. The professional staff
at the library is knowledgeable, co-operative, and always available to provide Linguistics Department
faculty and students with assistance. Whatever sources are not available in Sprague Library are almost
always accessible through interlibrary loan. The library home page, in particular the “Message from the
Dean” provides a good overview of available library resources and services, both electronic and paper.
.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
27
G. SUPPORT SERVICES
The secretarial support services available to the Linguistics Department have remained
unchanged since 1998. The secretary assigned to Linguistics is also the departmental secretary for the
Department of French, Russian, and German. One work-study student is assigned to the linguistics
program in the department office and provides significant assistance to the department faculty.
Maintenance of the department's website is a relatively new area for which the department needs
support services. This task requires a high-level of skill as knowledge of the Linux operating system and
webpage editing tools like DreamWeaver and FrontPage are needed. Support services are rather lacking
in this area. In the past five years, this task has been carried out by faculty and/or graduate assistants -when the department is lucky enough to have a graduate student who happens to have the appropriate
skill set. Currently this work is being done by the department chair. The department secretary is willing to
expand her knowledge of web design and is in the process of learning how to take on some of the
maintenance of the department's website. Because of the number of documents and links that need to be
constantly up-dated to keep the site current, it is not clear that this is the appropriate solution to a longrange issue although in the short run, it will give additional stability to the maintenance of the linguistics
department website.
H. RELATED DEPARTMENTS
The Linguistics Department continues to have a positive working relation with many other
departments in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS) as well as with several
departments in two other Colleges in the University, the College of Science and Mathematics (CSAM)
and the College of Education and Human Services (CEHS). While there are occasional disagreements
over the proper placement of certain courses and questions of control over particular topics and programs,
by and large, these issues are handled amicably. As interdisciplinary programs grow, cooperation among
departments is increasing. Within CHSS, Linguistics has particularly close ties with the departments of
Communications Sciences and Disorders, Psychology, and the various language departments. In CSAM,
contact is greatest with of the Computer Science department. In CEHS, the department has its closest ties
with Curriculum and Instruction.
I. ACCREDITATION
All appropriate state and national guidelines have been followed in all department programs. The
TESL certification program is accredited and exceeds state minimum requirements. The department has
recently submitted extensive documentation on its 1st and 2nd field TESL certification programs for the
rigorous standards being put into effect by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education
(NCATE).
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
28
J. LONG RANGE PLANS
Among the few certainties that Linguistics can forecast five years hence are the changes within
Montclair State University outlined in the Preface to this document. The current Linguistics Department
goals are designed to address these certainties.
Specifically, the long-range goals that Linguistics has outlined for itself are: (1) to accommodate
the increasingly large and diverse undergraduate student population that the university is beginning to
attract; (2) to develop the considerable resources within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences
for the field of second language acquisition education and research; (3) to develop additional certificategranting programs like the recently established TESOL certificate from the base of our Master of Arts
course offerings, to provide professional preparation for our graduates; and (4) to carry on activities
appropriate to the establishment of a Ph.D. degree program in Applied Linguistics, in anticipation of the
time when the circumstances within the university and the state make this possible. The department plans
to work towards growth in each of these four areas.
Larger Undergraduate Student Population
In order to introduce a larger segment of the new undergraduate student population to the field of
linguistics, the department is designing two new linguistics courses that will serve as general education
courses. One course, a social science course, covers issues that non-linguists need to know about language
to be educated citizens. These issues include debates over how language is cognitively processed, how
language shapes social life and attitudes, and how language is used to manipulate perceptions of the
political arena. The other course, a lab science course tentatively called “The Human Voice,” is a much
needed addition to the relatively small number of laboratory science courses that fulfill the general
education science requirement. This is a laboratory phonetics course that uses newly available Open
Source software plus speech databases and other recently purchased speech-processing software. The
course will educate students about both linguistic issues like categorial perception (the phonemic
principle) and technological issues like speech synthesis and speaker identification. The linguistics faculty
also hope that these two courses will attract a new breed of linguistics majors who are interested in either
the socio-political or more technical aspects of linguistics.
Language Acquisition Education and Research
Perhaps most crucial among the future needs of Montclair State University as a public institution,
and certainly the areas that will most directly affect Linguistics, are the two listed on page 2 of this
document:
 Language proficiency and new approaches to language acquisition.
 Cross-cultural understanding fostered through global area studies and the experience of diversity in
the classroom and beyond.
The need for advanced English language skills for an increasingly diverse population as English grows as
a global language, plus the need for English speakers to learn languages that are identified as strategic
cannot be over-emphasized. As the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recognizes, research in
strategic languages is different from prior language efforts, both because the languages are often less
commonly taught and because what is strategic today may change tomorrow.
In order to develop the considerable strengths within the College of Humanities and Social
Sciences in the field of language acquisition, several members of the department are currently working
with the linguists in the department of Spanish and the department of French, German, and Russian to
develop a language learning center that will take advantage of the unique position that Montclair State
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
29
occupies with respect to the heritage language communities that surround it. Linguistics sees this effort as
an effective means of expanding the Center for Language Acquisition, Instruction, and Research
(CLAIR), a center originally conceived for the purpose of consolidating under one umbrella the teaching
of the non-credit ESL courses, the academic ESL courses, and the non-Indo-European languages. The
center was also designed to maximize use of the innovations in language pedagogy emerging across these
disparate languages.
The linguistics department also envisions CLAIR as the center for the accommodation of
strategic languages, always cognizant of the fact that the inventory of which languages will be considered
“strategic” may change in a short period of time. Such changes will require flexibility in modes of
teaching and will require on-going research into the effectiveness of various language learning and
teaching methodologies and of various venues for instruction. The one strategic language course currently
being offered is Arabic; the course is only in its first year and is already oversubscribed. The department
would also like to explore possible relationships between the teaching of strategic languages and
linguistic research on these languages; for example, the faculty involved in these endeavors would like to
exploit the connections between teaching Arabic and working on its Army contract in Arabic-English
machine translation.
The Linguistics Department expects that CLAIR will facilitate the offering of courses in ESL and
other languages in a variety of formats that will be dictated by the needs of the students and not by the
administrative constraints of the Department. For example, the department is considering shorter term
courses that address specific student needs.
Development of Additional Certificate-Granting Programs
The current MA program is effectively serving the professional needs of the students enrolled in
the program; the majority of linguistics graduates continue in the teaching profession, and achieve a
higher income level as a result of obtaining an MA. An important trend over the past two years has been
the increase in the number of graduate students taking courses related to TESL, a result of the creation of
the TESOL certificate. The linguistics department would now like to strengthen other subfields within the
course offerings of the MA program by creating similar certificates that capitalize on the connections
among the subfields within the program. This would allow linguistics to attract the critical number of
students necessary to offer an additional number of MA electives each semester.
The MA electives serve the three subfields of applied linguistics identified as best serving the
current and future professional needs of the New York – Northern New Jersey region: a. Language
Acquisition; b. Language and Social Life; and c. Computational Linguistics. The TESOL certificate
combines courses from the first two subfields. The department envisions other certificates that would
combine different courses across these subfields. For example, a certificate in language teaching
technologies, which would combine core MA courses with courses in Language Acquisition and
Computational Linguistics is under consideration.
Professional Preparation for our Graduates
The linguistics department has developed a number of relationships with local industries and
government agencies in recent years (see section B4 above for a list of these entities). At this point, the
department no longer even needs to seek such these relationships as companies and state agencies are now
contacting linguistics directly. However, the paperwork and discussions involved in setting up and
maintaining such associations go beyond the scope of the faculty’s current assignments. Montclair’s
Office of Research and Sponsored Programs provides excellent assistance in this area, but much of the
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
30
work must be done within the department. The department envisions an office, possibly under the
supervision of CLAIR, that would administer these partnerships.
The most common task that industries seek from linguistics students is the annotation of text
and/or speech. Given current issues in research linguistics, the text annotation primarily involves tagging
items related to the discourse domain. These tasks give students a picture of research life within industry
and are commonly the springboard to a professional life in linguistics outside of academia. For example,
every phonetician and phonologist who has worked in industry has, at the beginning of their career,
segmented and labeled speech spectrograms. In an effort to introduce students to annotation, a course in
Corpus Linguistics was offered for the first time in Fall 2003, with a section on corpus annotation. In
order to better prepare students for these internship and externship opportunities, several faculty members
are exploring the development of a full course in annotation techniques and issues. The development of
the undergraduate Discourse Analysis course mentioned above will provide the needed background for
most of these annotation tasks.
The tasks that linguistic interns and externs perform sometimes require a profound understanding
of linguistic issues as well as careful attention to detail. Linguistics will need to work at recruiting
additional high caliber majors each semester. In the past five years, despite having a good cadre of
students, only one student entered linguistics from the University Honor’s Program. Linguistics plans to
work with the honors program to attract additional students to the major who would be particularly good
candidates for upcoming intern/externships.
Establishment of a Ph.D. degree program in Applied Linguistics
In continued anticipation of the establishment of a Ph.D. degree in Applied Linguistics, the
linguistics department plans to continue strengthening the subfields within the master’s program and to
continue developing relationships with local industry and government organizations, activities
characteristic of a doctoral granting department. The Linguistics faculty of Montclair will foster even
closer ties with other linguistics departments in the New York-New Jersey Metropolitan area. This will
give MSU students a wider view of the study and practice of linguistics, and will also give MSU’s
Linguistics faculty more opportunities to work with doctoral students, which will enhance the
opportunities to serve on Ph.D. committees, thus establishing a track record of advising at the Ph.D. level.
Finally, the faculty plan to further their grant seeking activities, an activity crucial to the operation of a
robust Ph.D. program. In addition to the current efforts within the department that are supported by the
university, several members of the department anticipate seeking further Defense Department funding
following on the Army machine translation contract. There is also an opportunity in the NSF Terascale
Linguistics Initiative for funding for the Montclair Electronic Language Database (MELD), a database of
ESL student writing annotated for error, and for other data annotation in which linguistics students have
developed considerable skills.
K. ENROLLMENT
The discussion below is based on enrollment figures available through Montclair State's Office of
Institutional Research Graduation and Retention Reports; the relevant unit behind these figures is the
student semester hour3. The figures provided by OIR are:
3
Student semester hours, SSHs, are calculated by multiplying the number of enrolled students in a class by the
number of class credits. Thus, 30 students enrolled in a 3-credit course generate 90 SSHs.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
31
Fall Student Semester Hour Counts
UG
Grad
Total
F98
F99
F00
F01
F02
F03
1179
233
1412
999
327
1326
771
343
1114
936
330
1266
882
378
1260
1164
395
1559
1 yr %
change
F02-F03
32.0
4.5
23.7
5 yr %
change
F98-F03
-1.3
69.5
10.4
The total changes within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences against which the figures for
Linguistics can be compared, were:
UG
Grad
Total
1 yr % change F02-F03
5.8
5.0
5.7
5 yr % change F98-F03
23.8
15.0
23.1
Spring4 Student Semester Hour Counts
UG
Grad
Total
S97
S98
S99
S00
S01
S02
910
312
939
264
826
241
945
270
780
322
876
311
1 yr %
change
S01-S02
12.3
-3.4
7.7
5 yr %
change
S97-S02
-3.7
-0.3
-2.9
The total changes within the College of Humanities and Social Sciences against which the figures for
Linguistics can be compared, were
UG
Grad
Total
1 yr % change F02-F03
3.3
12.2
4.0
5 yr % change F98-F03
13.8
-3.0
12.3
The undergraduate figures below show a large decline in enrollment during AY00-01, which
yields a 5 year negative change. The dip in S01 is actually spurious, since two professors from the
linguistics department taught Introduction to Cognitive Science, a Psychology Department course, in S01
which resulted in a loss of 135 SSH's to Psychology. Nevertheless, there was a general trend down from
the higher numbers of the earlier semesters.
The drop is due to changes in admissions policy with respect to non-native speakers of English.
Prior to 2000, the university ran a bilingual Weekend College, which enrolled many students who were
4
The spring numbers are smaller because most of the released time allotted to linguistics faculty is taken in the
spring, reducing the number of courses taught.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
32
required to enroll in the full range of English language classes. These students are now accommodated by
local community colleges. This has resulted in the closing of the department's introductory ESL classes.
Enrollments in ESL at the intermediate level remain a problem for the department. Because
English language skills are a necessary foundation for academic success, the department is required to run
ESL courses for students who place into them; yet, at the intermediate level, we have few students, again
as a result of more stringent admissions requirements.
The department is involved in two university-wide changes that will affect ESL enrollments: (1)
as of F04, students with poor English language skills will be required to take ESL courses, and (2) the
advanced level ESL courses have been submitted for approval as World Language courses under the new
General Education requirements. It is anticipated that these changes will increase enrollments in ESL in
the advanced courses, but the intermediate courses may continue to be an enrollment problem.
In contrast to the small 5-year dip is a promising 1-year rise in enrollments, a dramatic rise when
compared against the College as a whole. This is a result of enrollments in the General Education courses
offered by the department. For courses that fill, we are either offering multiple sections of the course, e.g.,
Language of Propaganda and American Sign Language, or offering the course every semester, e.g.,
Language and Gender.
The graduate figures show a high rise in the fall semester from F97 to F03, which reflects the
building up of the graduate program and the introduction of the TESOL certificate. While the spring
semesters show a slight fall over the 5-year period, the difference here is negligible and less than the
College as a whole.
In general, the linguistics department is pleased with the recent growth in enrollment. The
department’s Long Range Plans (see section J) will capitalize on the reasons for this growth, introducing
new courses within the GenEd framework at the undergraduate level, and at least one more certificate
program at the graduate level.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
33
Appendix I: LINGUISTICS DEPARTMENT COURSE-ROTATION
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
Linguistics Major Required Courses
Required Courses Offered Every Term
LNGN 210 Intro to General Linguistics
LNGN 220 Structure of American English
Required Courses Offered Fall Term
LNGN 300 Syntax
LNGN 230 Language in Society
LNGN 331 Phonetics
Required Courses Offered Spring Term
LNGN 301 Semantics
OR
LNGN 302 Pragmatics
LNGN 245 Language and Culture
LNGN 332 Phonology
TESL Courses
Required Courses Offered Every Term
LNGN 405 Field Experience in TESL
Required Courses Offered Fall Term
LNGN 403 Methods and Materials of TESL
Courses Offered Spring Term
LNGN 325 Principles of Second Language Learning
GRADUATE PROGRAM
MA in Applied Linguistics
Courses Offered Every Term
APLN 500 Language and Linguistics
APLN 605 Independent Research
Courses Offered in Alternating Fall Terms
APLN 502 Sociolinguistics
Elective (I)
Elective (II)
Courses Offered in Alternating Spring Term
APLN 506 Phonetics & Phonology
Elective (I)
Elective (II)
Courses Offered in Alternating Fall Term
APLN 504 Syntax
APLN 508 Res. Des. in Appl. Ling.
Elective (I)
Courses Offered in Alternating Spring Term
APLN 505 Semantics & Pragmatics
Elective (I)
Elective (II)
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
34
TESL Courses
Courses Offered Every Term
APLN 529 TESL Practicum
Courses Offered Fall Term
APLN 532 Language & Culture (II)
OR
APLN 534 Languages in Contact (II)
OR
APLN 536 Languages of the USA (II)
APLN 520 Current Theories of SLA (I)
Courses Offered Spring Term
APLN 525 Methodology of TESL(I)
APLN 524 Advanced Structure of
American English (II)
Appendix II: Retention and Enrollment Figures
The discussion below is based on the retention figures available through Montclair State's Office
of Institutional Research Graduation and Retention Reports.
Undergraduate Majors
The following table shows the retention figures for the undergraduate major since 2000
Graduating students are counted in the semester after they graduate to avoid "double counting" students
both as registered students and as graduating students in the same semester.
FLOW MODEL FOR MAJORS IN LINGUISTICS (BA)
FRESHMEN
TRANSFERS
OTHER ADMITS
FROM OTHER MSU MAJOR
** TOTAL NEW TO MAJOR**
CONTINUING IN MAJOR
RETURNING STOP OUTS
** TOTAL REGISTERED**
F00 S01
F01 S02 F02
S03
6
0
3
0
1
0
3
1
7
1
4
5
0
1
0
0
0
0
1
2
5
5
3
4
10
4
15
6
8
9
30
5
45
36
3
43
28
2
45
41
1
48
35
1
44
37
1
47
REGISTERED PRIOR SEMESTER
STOP OUTS
GRADUATED IN MAJOR
CHANGED TO OTHER MAJOR
DROPPED OUT OF MSU
DROPPED/ ON ACADEMIC PROBATION
0
9
3
4
0
2
2
3
2
0
2
7
1
4
1
0
3
1
0
0
0
10
2
1
0
1
1
5
0
Graduate Programs
The tables below show enrollment and graduation figures for the three graduate programs within
the department as reported by the university's Office of Institutional Research. OIR does not provide
retention figures for graduate programs, but retention can be inferred from the figures provided below.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
35
The graduation figures for each spring semester include graduates in the August and January prior to the
given spring numbers.
Master of Arts
F99
23
-
S00
25
0
F00
29
-
S01
31
2
F01
26
-
S02
25
9
F02
26
-
S03
26
4
F03
24
-
Post B.A. TESL
F99
Enrolled
13
Graduated
-
S00
12
7
F00
17
-
S01
13
8
F01
13
-
S02
16
9
F02
14
-
S03
16
15
F03
15
-
S00
F00
--
S01
--
F01
2
S02
3
F02
7
S03
9
F03
10
Enrolled
Graduated
TESOL5
F99
Enrolled
Graduated
Appendix III: MA's Conferred
Abdul Abdullah. Non-native acquisition of English perfect aspect marking.
Carmelle Aronovits. News Media Racial Profiling.
Soledad Banyuls. Contextual factors affecting the translation of two pairs of verbs.
Jacqueline Cassidy. Computer-mediated discussion groups as communities of practice. (thesis)
Betina Castano. Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Study of the Functions of you know, and, so on, and I mean
in the Speech of Second Language Learners.
Claudia Coscarello. The Word Out: A stylistic analysis of rap music. (thesis)
Donna DelPrete. Critical Discourse Analysis of the Treatment of Monica Lewinsky in the ClintonLewinsky Scandal.
Assumpta Foy. Isu noun phrase structure.
Patricia Gilbert. “I don't mean you”: Looking at non-second person reference of the second person
pronoun. (thesis)
Sandra Hernandez. Analysis of the discourse marker ‘o sea’ in spoken Mexican Spanish.
Luis Huerta. Motivation in a Foreign Language Learning Context
Mauricio Mendez-Lopez.
Masayo Oda. The perception of English /r/ and /l/ words by Japanese adults and the relationship with
lexical familiarity and loan words
Norma Pravec. Survey of language learner corpora.
Dana Risko. Computer-assisted vs. teacher-directed instruction and L2 vocabulary acquisition.
Donna Samko. Accounting for the success of adult second language learners: investigating affective
characteristics.
Julie Wang-Gempp. A corpus-based study of screen plays.
Szymon Wodecki. Polish agentless constructions.
5
The number of students working towards a TESOL certificate intersects with the number in the MA program.
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
36
Linguistics Department. 2004 VC Self-Study Guide.
37