PhDregret

I was in the same boat as you years ago - I had done a BA in French & Linguistics and wanted to continue that for my MA and eventual PhD. Yet almost no grad programs in French in the US let you focus on linguistics instead of literature. I ended up doing an MA in Linguistics with a TESL certificate, which led me to teaching English in France so I could finally become fluent, then I went to Australia for my PhD in Applied Linguistics focusing on the teaching of French since the scholarships are great and there is no coursework at universities in the Commonwealth (it's all research so you can do whatever you want everyday!) So in short, you will probably need to do a degree in Applied Linguistics/Second Language Acquisition instead and find an advisor that lets you focus on French rather than English linguistics. It's a real shame that US grad programs in languages only offer literature! I will warn you though - having a degree in linguistics makes it hard to find academic jobs in French since almost every university wants someone who specializes in literature, and even linguistics jobs are hard to get without research in theoretical linguistics or TESOL (for applied ling). So even though I did the degrees I wanted to, I cannot find an academic job in either French or applied linguistics since my research doesn't exactly fit perfectly within either discipline. :/

Thanks for this great info! I am really interested in doing a certificate in computational linguistics (and maybe even an MS), but I can't find any that are completely online. I know the UW Master's can be done online, but I have no math background and only recently started learning to program in Python so I would need to take several courses before I would even be considered. I'm actually most interested in corpus linguistics and its applications to teaching foreign languages and materials design, but I can't find any programs specifically for that - though I am only looking in the US for now.

Linguistics is a subforum under Social Sciences: http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/61-linguistics/