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In order to prepare the students to conduct their research successfully, the courses offered are separated into compulsory and optional courses (See programme structure on the website: sola.kmutt.ac.th/homesola/?page_id=332). The compulsory courses include Advanced Research Methodology, which all the Plan B students are required to take. Plan A students are also strongly recommended to take this course in order to lay foundation of how to do research. Therefore, Plan A students are encouraged to start their study in the second semester when the course is offered. The other compulsory is conducted as elective in that the students can choose between Theories in Language Learning and Linguistic Theory and Practice depending on their background in order to expand their perspectives and to develop their expertise as Applied Linguists (See PhD curriculum at sola.kmutt.ac.th/homesola/?page_id=334). Those who graduated in Linguistics have to take Theories in Language Learning so that they understand how the language is learned. Those who have background in teaching will take Linguistic Theories. The optional courses are offered according to the students’ interests depending on the focus of their theses. In the last academic year, the courses offered are Discourse Analysis, which is a basic course to lay background on qualitative analysis, Sociolinguistics, and The Process of Language Learning. These three courses have been offered to almost every batch based on the students’ choice. They are considered as foundation courses for any PhD topics. The main problem of our programme is that there are only 3-5 students in each batch; therefore, we can’t offer too many optional courses due to cost effectiveness even though there are more optional courses listed in the programme content. Therefore, not all the students could enroll in the courses which are directly related to their topics but it is expected that they can use the knowledge gained in their future. However, the programme invites visiting professors to give workshop and consultation to the PhD students every year in order to expand their horizon to the area which they are not familiar with in order to develop breath of knowledge. The students can make an appointment to discuss about their thesis with them if they want to have suggestions for their thesis. Last year, we invited Assoc.Prof. Dr.David Cassells Johnson from the University of Iowa to do the workshop on language policy. The consultation with him helped the student to change her direction by including language policy in her discussion (See Appendix 8_David Johnson workshops_Schedule for the programme of his workshop and the consultation list, and Appendix 9_David Cassel Johnson_report for the report).
The design of the sequence of the courses offered in the programme is rather loose because research is an independent activity. We tend to offer other out of class activities which enable the students to share and learn from one another. With regard to courses offered, the students are expected to learn research methodology as it is important for the development of their research design. The other courses cover possible areas of research interests and are independent from one another. The only common ground among those courses are that all of them have to encourage the students to do small scale research to help students develop research skills before they submit research proposal.
It seems like the taught courses cannot be evaluated in order to show if they can develop students’ competence and attitudes. The main factors to develop these two aspects are thesis and supervision. We may have to find ways to evaluate those courses in order to see if they actually contribute to the PLOs.