BA English Language / Course details

Our BA English Language course is ideal for analytical minds who want to delve into the science of language - an everyday phenomenon which impacts our lives on an individual and a global scale.

English Language covers the history of the English language and the variation between English dialects in the UK and further afield.

You will acquire the skills required for analytical language study alongside the means to apply those skills to the study of historical and present-day English. In addition, you will practise key transferable skills, such as essay writing and how to give a presentation.

English Language at The University of Manchester is unrivalled in its breadth of subject areas and theoretical approaches. Our particular strengths include phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax (lexical-functional grammar, role and reference grammar, construction grammar, and minimalism), and formal semantics and pragmatics.

You'll be encouraged to take an active role in funded teaching-enhancement projects. For example, some of our students have developed an online atlas of dialect variation in the UK.

Placement year option

Apply your subject-specific knowledge in a real-world context through a placement year in your third year of study, enabling you to enhance your employment prospects, clarify your career goals and build your external networks.

Study abroad

You may apply to spend one semester studying abroad during Year 2. Exchange partners are offered through the Erasmus Exchange scheme (in Sweden) and the Worldwide Exchange scheme (eg USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore).

Study an additional subject

Flexible Honours may allow you to study an additional arts, languages or cultures subject.

You'll be taught through a mixture of:

• formal lectures
• tutorials
• one-to-one supervision.

You'll spend approximately 12 hours each week in formal study sessions and further time in independent study.

In your independent study time, you may be reading, producing written work, revising for examinations or working as part of a team of students. You'll also have the opportunity to study a modern language.

In your final year, you'll have the option to write a 12,000-word dissertation. You'll undertake research on a topic of your own choice under the supervision of a member of staff in English Language and Linguistics.

Our courses are assessed in various ways, for example, written examinations, oral presentations and different types of coursework.

Coursework may include library research, linguistic fieldwork and data collection, or web-based research.

You will access resources to enhance your learning, including an extensive collection of linguistics texts and our psycholinguistics and phonetics laboratories, with facilities for:

• signal analysis
• speech synthesis
• laryngography
• electropalatography.

Find out more on the Facilities page.