Not
all college teachers are full professors. Many are assistant or adjunct professors.
This week in our Foreign Student Series, we discuss academic titles in American
higher education.
Adjunct professor Charles Varani at Western Oregon University in Monmouth in 2005
Professors usually have doctorate degrees.
But college students may be taught by instructors who have not completed their
doctorate degrees. After that, the instructor could become an assistant
professor. Assistant professors do not have tenure.
A professor with tenure cannot be easily
dismissed. Such appointments are permanent.
Those hired with the understanding they will seek tenure are said to be
“on the tenure track.” Assistant professor is the first job on this
path.
Assistant professors have five to seven years
to get tenure. They must teach, carry out research and publish their findings. Other professors then study the work. If
tenure is denied, the person usually has a year to find another job. An
assistant professor who receives tenure becomes an associate professor and may
later be appointed a full professor.
Professors on the tenure track teach classes, advise
students and carry out research. They also serve on committees and take part in
community activities.
Other teachers are not
expected to do all this. They are not on a tenure track. They are called adjuncts.
An adjunct professor is hired to teach for a limited time,
usually one semester. Adjunct professors may have a doctorate. But they receive
lower pay than those on the tenure track and have no job security.
The American Association of University Professors says sixty-eight
percent of all teacher appointments at American colleges today are adjuncts. College
officials say one reason is low budgets. Another is having the freedom to
change teachers as courses become more or less popular. They also say part-time adjuncts can provide
real world experience for their students.
But
the AAUP and other college officials say too many adjuncts mean lower educational
quality. They say adjuncts do not have the time or support to help students
outside class. And they say fewer tenure
track positions mean fewer people to work with students, create new courses and
serve on committees.
And that’s the VOA Special English Education Report,
written by Nancy Steinbach. Transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our
programs are at voaspecialenglish.com. I’m
Shirley Griffith.
Studies
have shown that the fewer medicines a person has to take the more likely he or
she will take them. Last week, a study
was released about a new treatment that combines five medicines for heart
disease in one pill. Salim Yusuf of
McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada was the lead investigator. He
presented the findings at the American College of Cardiology Conference in
Orlando, Florida.
The
experimental drug is known as Polycap. It contains aspirin, a drug to lower cholesterol and three medicines to
lower blood pressure. The study was carried out at fifty health centers across
India. More than two thousand people between the ages of forty-five and eighty took
part in the study. All had at least one
risk factor for heart disease. These include high blood pressure, high
cholesterol, diabetes or being severely overweight.
The
people were divided into nine groups of about two hundred people each. One group took Polycap. The other groups took either a single drug or
different combinations of the medicines in the Polycap pill. The study showed that Polycap lowered blood
pressure and cholesterol without many side effects. Doctor Yusuf said the
single pill, taken once a day, could reduce the average person’s risk of heart
disease and stroke by about half. The maker of Polycap, Cadila Pharmaceuticals
of India, paid for the study.
Cardiovascular diseases of the heart and blood vessels
are the number one cause of death around the world. These diseases kill more than seventeen million
people every year.
Eighty
percent of them are in low and middle income countries. Doctor Yusuf said the
single pill treatment could revolutionize heart disease prevention. People would be more likely to take one pill
a day than many pills. And one pill
would cost less than several pills.
Other heart doctors say heart disease
prevention is important but not necessarily with pills. They say patients might be able to get the
same results with changes in diet and exercise.
Doctors
say that more research on Polycap is needed. They say the drug should be tested on thousands more people, including those
in different risk, age and ethnic groups.
And
that’s the VOA Special English Health Report, written by Caty Weaver. Transcripts, MP3s and podcasts of our programs
are at voaspecialenglish.com. I’m Steve Ember.
AA:
I’m Avi Arditti and this week on WORDMASTER: meet an English teacher in
the United Arab Emirates. She stopped by the VOA Special English booth
at the recent TESOL convention, for Teachers of English to Speakers of
Other Languages. It took place in Denver, Colorado.
AA: “Tell me your name and a little bit about yourself.”
LEILA
MOUHANNA: “My name’s Leila Mouhanna. I’m a teacher at a foundations
program at a university in the U.A.E, of Lebanese background, raised in
Australia.”
AA: “Tell me a little bit about English teaching in the Emirates right now, the state of English teaching.”
LEILA
MOUHANNA: “There’s a big push by the government to promote English as a
foreign language. So eighty percent of the U.A.E.’s population are
foreigners, so there’s a big push to get English just for communication
purposes. Also, it’s becoming — it’s a globalized country, they need
it for economic reasons. So it’s very important.”
AA: “And what
about the resources you have, Internet or educational materials, what
do you find works? What do you personally have the most success with in
teaching English?”
LEILA MOUHANNA: “Possibly the best way is
probably having an eclectic approach to the resources, the kinds of
resources that you use with your students. I don’t just focus on using
one textbook. It’s a variety of different materials from all over the
place — you know, YouTube or Internet resources, textbooks from a
variety of places. So, yeah, pretty much everything.”
AA: “You mentioned YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. How can English teachers use YouTube in the classroom?”
LEILA
MOUHANNA: “I’ve just used it just to build field knowledge about
different topics that students need to write about. So, for example,
they had to write an essay about nuclear power. So we’d look at
different video footage of catastrophes that have happened all over the
world using nuclear power and things like that. And that gets them to
build their vocabulary, to build knowledge about the field, and then to
transfer that knowledge and get them to write about it.”
AA: “So
it’s interesting, you’re using video — it sounds like mostly for
listening comprehension, although also for the material. But it occurs
to me, you’ve got sites now obviously like YouTube, millions of videos
available. I wonder if the fifth skill would now be visual
comprehension. There’s reading, writing, listening and speaking, and
now, when you have video, does that add kind of a fifth dimension to
teaching?”
LEILA MOUHANNA: “Well, [there's] critical literacy,
the visual literacy, but there’s always the time constraints, so you
can’t really get into it. But I’ve never really had a big issue with
it. My students really love television, really love using the Internet,
so they’re very technologically savvy.”
AA: “And I’m assuming — do some of your students use Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and sites like that?”
LEILA
MOUHANNA: “Yes, yes. But I don’t venture into any of these Web sites. I
think it’s a bit iffy, I think it’s a bit problematic.”
AA:
“Well, let’s talk briefly about social media sites. I know a lot of
teachers use those for English teaching. What do you see as the sort of
pluses and minuses of using social media sites as a teaching resources?”
LEILA
MOUHANNA: “Well, I personally would steer clear away from it, because
it can cause a lot of potential problems, especially coming from a very
traditional society, working with females. So it could cause a lot of
issues to arise that I wouldn’t even contemplate initially.”
AA: “But do your students, though, find it useful to them in their own learning?”
LEILA MOUHANNA: “I don’t think they use it for learning. I think they use it as a social utility.”
AA:
Leila Mouhanna from the United Arab Emirates is one of the teachers
we’re introducing you to, from the recent TESOL convention in Denver,
Colorado. Tell us what you think about using social networking sites as
an English teaching resource. Your comments are welcome at
voanews.com/wordmaster.
And you can now follow our weekly segments
through Twitter, at twitter.com/voalearnenglish, all one word. And
that’s WORDMASTER for this week. I’m Avi Arditti.
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