WMU should offer a graduate program in linguistics

By Hassan Al-Momani
Western Herald

Linguistics has become one of the most important majors offered by most American universities.

There is a high demand in the world for the specialists of linguistics who can teach the science of language in all its perspectives, such as the syntactic, semantic, morphological and phonological aspects.

Additionally, linguistics is a rich and open field of research because the researchers can conduct studies on discourse analysis, the social and psychological contexts of language.

Thus, linguistics is a vital field of specialty for all the students who want to focus on studying languages, including its forms, styles and rules.

Western Michigan University has the English department, which is one of the most powerful departments.

All of the professors within the English department at WMU are highly distinguished and they make the department a prominent one by their distinguished research and effective methodologies of teaching.

We have three Ph.D. programs offered by the English department: English Languages and Literature, Creative Writing and Teaching English as a Second Language.

These programs attract a lot of students from the U.S. and from all over the world because they are very distinguished ones.

However, there is still a need to offer a fourth graduate program within the English department, which is linguistics.

If WMU opens this program, there would be a lot of students who would want to join it. This is due to the fact that linguistics is highly demanded by the international students whose universities are interested in making them teach the science of language.

The English department has a great potential to open such a program because of the fact that the department has distinguished faculty members who can teach the linguistics courses effectively and let their students study linguistics in light of literary texts.

In other words, our professors of English can focus on teaching literary discourse analysis which is a part of literature and linguistics.

In fact, there is a strong common ground between studying linguistics and literature and there are a lot of theories that prove that the best way to learn a language is to study it in light of literature.

Additionally, the English department offers some language courses for the graduate and undergraduate levels that help the students to know about the recent linguistic theories.

The number of these courses could be increased to form a group of courses that would be suitable for a graduate program in linguistics.

Furthermore, if the university thinks about the availability of faculty members for this program, it can ask other professors specialized in linguistics in the Foreign Language Department to teach these courses.

Some professors within the School of Communication might be useful to teach a course on media discourse analysis, which is a part of both linguistics and journalism.

Finally, Western Michigan should open a graduate program in linguistics because it will help our university to overcome its economic crisis by attracting alarge amount of students who want to specialize in this field.

This major will open new horizons for   students, researchers and professors to conduct interdisciplinary research.

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Posted by HeraldAdmin on Jun 6 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

Cody Kimball
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