English Language at
University
The following material was collected from
the Internet and serves as an introduction to some of the
places offering language
or linguistics as part of their degree courses:
Naturally most of the material was written by lecturers at
these institutions themselves, so expect a little bias!
A couple of points from Angela Goddard at Manchester Met:
- just
because someone well known works in a certain university,
there's no guarantee that students will come anywhere near
them. in fact, with the current research assessment exercise,
it's more likely these days that that person will be hived
off in research rather than teaching. so, ironically, some
places that have high status and reputations may well get
most of their teaching done by poorly paid teaching assistants
on short-term contracts. so I'm not sure that thinking about
who works where is all that useful.
- it
seems to me that one of the students' central problems
is not whether one place or another runs language and linguistics,
but what kind of language study they want to do and/or will
be faced with. also what language study is likely to be 'called'
in higher education or even in different parts of the same
institution. for example, at MMU I teach on a degree called
Human Communication, which has a lot of language work that
focuses on social contexts, while I'm not even sure whether
our English department does anything along these lines -
if they do, I'd guess it has a very literary focus. on the
other hand, my colleagues in psychology teach something called
'language' that has a much more clinical and 'scientific'
flavour than the kind of language work I'm familiar and happy
with. on the BA in Human Comm, we get quite a few students
with English Lang qualifications who are pleasantly surprised
that they recognise the kind of language programmes they
get, because (they say) the word 'communication' isn't usually
associated with either language or literature. i think that
says something about the politics of our subject names and
the way those subjects are positioned in the school curriculum.
the best thing to do is go to open days and ask the staff
some questions. failing that, phone them up and ask for some
reading lists. with the focus on recruitment rather than
selection in many universities, students are much more powerful
than they realise.
Other
General Points:
Following
up the question about where language study might be found
in HE: at UWE Bristol, some language
work is done
within the School of Cultural and Media Studies. I teach
a year's course in Journalism which attracts students
majoring in English because it picks up from their A level
language
studies (I even begin by using some of the same material).
John Hodgson Reading has a combined degree with Philosophy and Linguistics.
Good news! Another good place to look for a list of UK universities
offering linguistics (= the study of language) is the Linguistics
Association home page, and specifically . It's worth directing
your students to the LAGB site as a source of information
(e.g. an accessible intro to linguistics).
An additional University with excellent standing for linguistics
is University College London. Despite the fact that I didn't
go there, my own lecturer at University was taught there
- and by Sir Randolph Quirk - the god of grammar. I'm not
sure of the staff line-up now though. It is supposed to have
excellent phonetics resources, and it is one of their specialisms.
In fact the official International Phonetic Alphabet tape
is recorded by a lecturer from there. Hope this helps.
Just a little more detail on courses at Lancaster. Students
can take single major degrees in Linguistics, or English
Language, or Language in Society. In addition, we have a
large number of combined major degrees, including:
English Language and Linguistics
English Language and Literature English Language and Teaching
English as a Foreign Language
English Language and a Modern Language
Linguistics and English Literature
Linguistics and a Modern Language
Linguistics and Philosophy
Linguistics and Psychology
Might as well mention Cardiff too! We offer three BA degree
courses in language: English Language Studies Language and
Communication Communication and joint honours opportunities
with Language Studies, including, as it happens, with Philosophy
I'm always delighted to see students with a genuine interest
in language applying to us!
University of Westminster. We offer English Language Joint
honours with other languages (German, French, Spanish, Italian,
Arabic) also English Language and Linguistics (each year
4 modules Linguistics, 2 modules core English Language and
then a choice of 2 from Literature, Language Teaching and
open choice modules) and a new route (proving extremely popular
- all credit to current A level teaching no doubt!) English
Language and English Literature (each year 4 modules Literature,
2 modules core English Language and then a choice of 2 from
Linguistics, Language Teaching and open choice modules).
We are working on offering English Language with other subjects
and will be able to offer a wider choice next year (2002).
We are situated in Regent Street, 3 blocks up from Oxford
Circus and will have an Open Day on May 9th, so send your
students for a chat! Contact details Westminster
Sheffield University (as opposed to Sheffield Hallam) offers
both English Language and Human Communication.
There's many more: for example Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle,
Nottingham, Sheffield, Leeds, even, dare I say it, Manchester.
There may even be some down south, but who wants to go there
anyway?
Some places hide their English Language course under some
other rubric, often simply the result of admissions policies
and UCAS requirements. If your students are interested in
any particular place, just you contact the relevant department
(usually either English or Linguistics, and you can rarely
tell which of the two is best). But any half-decent admissions
officer should help, and if they don't then you know your
students would be better off going somewhere else!!!
Students can study English language as part of our Linguistics
courses too, at Queen Mary, University of London. They could
look at our website and search under the School of Modern
Languages.
Roehampton Institute (U of Surrey ) does some good Eng Lang
courses too. Quite different, for those who want to work
creatively in the media, Leeds has two broadcasting courses,
both prestigious and competitive. Finally, think about Bangor,
where Professor Crystal teaches.
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