Report on the Foreign Language Education Masters Programme: Pete Westbrook - May 2009

Last summer (2008) I qualified as a Master of Language Education from CBS. At the time I started the programme, I was working as an English instructor for Babel Sprogtræning, a private language school providing tailor-made second language training to adults employed in companies in the Greater Copenhagen area. I had at that point been teaching English to adults for some 10 years, and as the only formal language teaching qualification I had was a TEFL Certificate, I had long felt a need for some form of further education to provide me with a more theoretical background to support and supplement my practical experience of teaching English as a foreign language. My employer (Babel) also agreed to finance me taking the programme; she then had the double benefit of gaining a much more qualified teacher coupled with guaranteeing me staying with the company over at least the three-year duration of the programme. 

For me the - at that time - newly-created, part-time CBS Foreign Language Education Masters programme was therefore an ideal means of gaining such a theoretical background. At the time of applying for the programme, (which I did partly as a result of being encouraged by an English friend who also started at the same time as I did),  I was weighing up the pros and cons of doing a distance-learning Masters in Applied Linguistics from an English university. However, I am very glad that I opted for the CBS programme instead, one of the big advantages being that the combination of self-study and actually attending ‘live' lectures suited my learning style much better than a 100% self-study programme. Having real fellow students with whom I could network, compare notes and discuss difficulties, as well as lecturers who could provide help and advice both via email and face-to-face proved very beneficial.

In addition, I found all the five modules' themes highly interesting and extremely relevant, even though my area of work perhaps fell slightly outside the ‘mainstream' of the other students, most of whom worked in the public Danish education system. From general second language acquisition theory to more specific aspects of language teaching like for example testing, the approach of combining theory with practice gave me ample opportunity to apply what I was learning directly to various aspects of my own teaching work. Overall, I found the ratio of theory to practice to be about right for me.

Being British, I was initially concerned about being able to follow lectures in Danish. However, it very quickly became apparent that my receptive skills in Danish were good enough to understand virtually everything in the lectures and to read the Danish texts; furthermore both the lecturers and my fellows students were more than willing to help if there was anything I was uncertain about. The other side of the coin was of course that with the vast majority of the texts being in English, I actually had a slight advantage over the other (Danish) students. The only problems I experienced were with the one or two Swedish texts included in the set reading material.

In terms of workload, I personally felt that the balance was about right: enough to challenge me, but not so much that I got stressed about it. The written assignments too were long enough so that I felt I really had to think about and plan carefully how I was going to approach them, while being short enough to force me into being more precise and concise than I otherwise would have been. In addition, I very much appreciated being permitted to write all my assignments and do all my oral exams, a somewhat new form of examination for me, in English. This meant that I could fully express myself without being compromised by my limitations in Danish.

Finally, since completing my Masters studies the qualification has in a very concrete sense led to career advancement. As a result of having obtained the Masters in Foreign Language Education qualification and through contacts I had made on the Masters programme itself, I was ‘headhunted' and now work for the Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use at the University of Copenhagen, where I provide English training for both administrative and teaching staff at the university.

So all in all, I found the Foreign Language Education Masters programme to be very useful and relevant to my work and general interest in foreign language teaching, and I very much enjoyed following it. The programme exceeded my initial expectations on almost all fronts.