DENTON (UNT), Texas — Heather Causey said she always wanted to teach in a low socioeconomic school and be an advocate for immigrants. The Amarillo resident planned at first to teach English literature, earning a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of North Texas in 2006, then enrolled right away in the master of arts program in linguistics.

But when she heard of a new master’s degree program in English as a Second Language that would allow her to study in Mexico as well as at UNT, she switched her study plan.

On Dec. 18 (Friday), Causey will be the first student to graduate from the UNT Department of Linguistics and Technical Communication’s joint degree master’s program between UNT and the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico, or UAEM, in Toluca. Students complete 36 academic credit hours — 18 during two semesters at UNT, then 18 during two semesters at UAEM — to earn both the master of arts degree in ESL from UNT and a master of arts degree in English language teaching from UAEM. They also each complete a professional development project in which they identify specific challenges related to ESL/EFL learning.

“ESL teachers are in high demand in all parts of the world,” Causey says. “And living in another country for an extended amount of time gives you a different perspective on the English language and helps you see things from the eyes of students who will be learning the language.”

Causey is the daughter of Robert and Lou Anne Causey of Amarillo and a 2002 graduate of Randall High School. Her parents and her grandmother, Jean Irwin, will be attending her graduation at UNT, which begins at 4 p.m. in the UNT Coliseum. The coliseum is located on the southeast corner of North Texas Boulevard and Highland Street.

Causey had visited only border and resort towns in Mexico before spending the 2008-09 academic year at UAEM, which opened a liaison office on the UNT campus in 2005. For her research project, she studied the effects of error corrections in compositions written by UAEM students who had low proficiency in English. Half of the students, who were 19 to 25 years old, received corrections on grammar by Causey for what they had written, while the other group received only comments on the contents of their writing and no grammar correction.

When the two groups wrote compositions a second time, Causey discovered that the students for whom she had provided grammar corrections the first time were not any more accurate in their grammar than the other students, but had significantly decreased their language fluency — the amount of English words that they had written.

“That’s something called an avoidance technique,” Causey says, adding that professionals in second language acquisition often debate if corrections for written compositions are necessary.

“Empirical evidence has not proven that error correction improves the writing skills of second language students. If you’re being careful about not making grammar mistakes, you may not write as much,” she says. “The idea is that if you’re starting to learn a language, it’s more important to just produce words and sentences than for them to be perfect. The accuracy will improve with more fluency.”

Causey’s mentors for the project were Elsa Mejia at UAEM and Dr. Jennifer Larson-Hall, UNT assistant professor of linguistics and technical communication.

While in Toluca, Causey also taught a class of students preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, an exam that many U.S. universities require international students to pass before they can be admitted to the universities. She has also taught students learning English at UNT’s Intensive English Language Inistitute.

After receiving her master’s degree, Causey will return to Toluca to teach English. She would eventually like to become an administrator for an ESL program.