Welcome

The Department teaches two subject areas: General Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.

General Linguistics is the scientific study of language in all its facets. Language is a fundamentally important aspect of human life, and impinges on virtually everything that we do. Thus, Linguistics is a study which shares interests with a very wide range of other disciplines, and usefully complements a variety of other subject areas, such as the language subjects, Philosophy, Education, Sociology, Social Anthropology, Psychology and Artificial Intelligence.

Applied Linguistics is concerned with the application of the insights gained from the study of language to practical problems, such as how best to teach languages, what are the issues in language policy formulation, language in communication, especially electronic communication, and so on.

The Department's courses in Linguistics constitute a major for the BA and BSocSc degrees of the University, while the Applied Linguistics courses are taught for three specific qualifications, the PostGraduate Certificate in Second Language Teaching, The PostGraduate Diploma in Second Language Teaching and the MA (Applied) in Applied Linguistics.

The Department is also responsible for offering undergraduate courses in English as a Second Language. These courses which are designed to help students for who English is an additional language (EAL) develop social, generic and textual competencies to equip them to understand the university disciplinary discourses which they are studying.