Page 18 - ELG2312 Dec Issue 487

SPECIAL SUPPLEMENT .

Creating the global rankings

Before you read on, make sure to have a look at how the university
rankings are put together – Melanie Butler explains…

Contents the Canadians, though, use the term TESL. Additionally, both Oxford
University and the Ontario Institute in the Study of Education (OISE) at
WORLDWIDE TOP 10 the University of Toronto offer AL and Language Teaching, which cover
more than just English.
Top 10 schools for Linguistics We limit our choice to English-medium degrees but not necessarily
19 and Education in English-speaking countries. In our Top 10 (page 19) we list the best
20 our UK REF-based rankings we also check under English Language, but
English-medium universities for both Linguistics and Education. For
UNDERSTANDING THE RANKINGS
we simply do not have enough data on the research area of individual
Information and key for our tables
university departments outside the UK to do that here.
Many of the top-performing universities listed under Linguistics
21 by QS do not offer Masters in a TEFL-related field. The trend is to
offer only a five-year Combined Masters and PhD programme, though
EDUCATION RANKINGS
most do have a short four-week style certificate course on offer for new
teachers. There are a few more US Colleges offering relevant degrees in
Education departments, not least because one-year Masters are still the
22 norm in schools of Education.
One good thing about doing rankings by subject is that you can pick out
ENGLISH LANGUAGE RANKINGS
the universities which, though not super famous globally, are particularly
strong in this area. The University of Hawai’i at Manoa, for example, is
not listed under the QS top 300 universities overall but it come in the top
22 20 globally for Linguistics and is fifth in our Linguistics list.
The British just pip the rest of the world to the post in Education, with
UCL’s Institute of Education – deemed best in the world by QS – at the
LINGUISTICS RANKINGS
top, and arch-rival, University of Oxford, second. Edinburgh is the only
British institution to appear both for Education and Linguistics. There
are two Americans in the list: Columbia University and the University
of Michigan. Meanwhile, the OISE carries the flag for Canada, and
WHAT’S NEXT FOR YOUR CAREER? Monash for Australia.
The honours in Linguistics are pretty evenly spread geographically.
How you can take your career There are two British Universities in the lead, followed by both universities
23 to the next level in Singapore and one from Hong Kong. Australia comes in with two, the
US and Canada have one each, and we have one from Europe’s master
linguists – the Dutch – run by the University of Leiden.
ll Gazette rankings depend on publicly available information. The most extraordinary link among our top Linguistics departments,
Whenever the Gazette does a UK ranking, whether for Masters however, is not geographic at all. Three institutions – Hong Kong
or Language Centres, the cry comes back to rank other U, Macquarie and Lancaster – have the same founding father: the late
A countries. In terms of Language Centres, we can’t; aside from Professor Christopher Candlin.
France, no national accreditation system publishes the detailed results Continuing on from our worldwide unis list, we have this year’s full
of inspections. UK and Ireland QS rankings. These include, where applicable, their
The same is true when it comes to research; the UK government REF scores. For more information, take a glance at page 20. As always,
Research Excellence Framework (REF), known to all as that which happy reading!
examines research submitted in 34 specified areas across the country, does
the trick. We compile our own data on which TEFL-related Masters submit
research under each category and can check that lecturers on the Masters
list have submitted research to the REF. But this only covers the UK.
There are several international university rankings we could use.
However, only QS compiles a ranking by subject. This gives most
weight to Academic Reputation, which together with reputation among
employers makes up 50% of the overall score. A further 20% is given for
citations; they take the number of times research from these departments
are cited in top-ranked international journals and divide them by the
number of academic staff. Academic staff to student ratios makes up a
further 20%. If it’s research excellence you are looking for in a Masters,
then the REF may be a better guide, at least for the UK, but reputation is
also very important, especially when it comes to finding a job.
Our job is to check which of the universities are listed under the two
main TEFL-related subject areas on the QS rankings – Linguistics and
Education – to strip out all those listed which do not offer appropriate
Masters, usually for Applied Linguistics (AL) and TESOL. Many of
18 December 2023